Upsun

What Upsun actually is

Upsun is the cloud application platform formerly known as Platform.sh. The company launched an offering named Upsun in April 2024 and completed the full rebrand in September 2025 — platform.sh now redirects to upsun.com — so if you evaluated "Platform.sh" at any point in the last decade, this is that product. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Paris and San Francisco (Platform.sh SAS in Paris, Platform.sh, Inc. in the US), it is a B-Corp-certified, fully remote company of roughly 290 people that reports more than 6,000 enterprise customers and 16,000 developers.

The product is a managed application platform driven by your Git repository. You describe your stack — application containers, workers, databases, caches, search — in YAML inside the repo, push, and Upsun provisions and runs it. The differentiator they lead with is environment cloning: every branch gets a production-parity preview environment with cloned data, services, and routing, so reviewers test real behaviour instead of screenshots. Deploys are blue-green with health checks, configuration changes are commits (auditable as a git log), and scaling is per-service: CPU, memory, and instance counts set independently for app containers and workers.

It is genuinely multicloud in a way most PaaS products are not. Projects run on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, IBM Cloud, or OVHcloud depending on region, and the same YAML configuration is portable across them. Region choice covers EU data-residency needs well: Zurich (Google Cloud), Berlin (Google Cloud), Paris (OVHcloud and Azure), London (Google Cloud), Dublin (AWS), Stockholm (AWS), plus Montreal, multiple US regions, and Australian regions. The public region metadata lists at least sixteen regions; some US regions carry HIPAA flags.

The managed service catalogue is broad — 25+ services including MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch and MongoDB (the latter two as managed services with minimum commitments), plus object storage, and built-in observability with continuous profiling and APM. Compliance is a core selling point: PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. Where this platform sits in our /category/managed-cloud category is the "serious PaaS" end — think Heroku's developer experience with enterprise governance and no single-cloud ceiling.

Pricing: what you really pay

Upsun's pricing page leads with "No plans. No bundles. Pay only for what you provision," and the structure backs it:

• Project fee: $9.00 per project per month (€9.00 in the EU). Covers on-demand preview environments, 30 days of infrastructure metrics, 15 minutes of continuous profiling, 2.5 hours of build CPU, 5 hours of build memory, 10 GB of egress bandwidth, and 500,000 ingress requests.
• User licenses: $10.00 per user per month, with advanced user management at an extra $9.00 per user.
• Resources: billed per second on allocation — CPU and RAM for each container and service. The hourly figures on the calculator are estimates over 732 hours/month.
• Storage: $0.50/GB per month per environment (€0.49), backups $0.10/GB per backup, object storage from €0.0833/GB (512 GB minimum).
• Standard support is applied by default at +10% of global spend. Read that line twice — it is the kind of surcharge that surprises people.

Entry to try it is free: a 15-day trial with no credit card and a monthly credit that covers one project fee plus one user license (roughly $19/month of value). We are deliberately not calling that a free tier — the credit offsets fixed fees, but provisioned resources are still metered, and the ongoing credit is a promotion that could change. Fastly-based add-ons (WAF Basic from $90 per million requests in the first tier, Image Optimization at $60 per 10 million images) carry twelve-month minimum terms. Enterprise adds volume plans, prepayment, custom invoices above $1,000/month, and deployment into your own cloud account.

Compared with Heroku-style dyno tiers, provision-based pricing avoids the over-provisioning tax: if a worker needs RAM but not CPU, you size it exactly. Compared with raw VMs it is expensive — you are paying a platform margin on top of compute. In our view the honest framing is that Upsun's price includes the DevOps work you are not doing: no Kubernetes to run, no migration tooling to build, no preview environments to maintain. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on your team.

Performance & infrastructure

The infrastructure is real hyperscaler capacity — AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM Cloud, OVHcloud — with Upsun's orchestration layer on top, so the underlying reliability is that of the cloud you pick. Regional granularity is good: separate EU regions on different providers (Paris on OVHcloud and Azure, Dublin and Stockholm on AWS, Zurich and Berlin on Google Cloud) lets compliance, carbon intensity, or latency drive the choice. Upsun also publishes carbon-intensity data per region and incentivises low-carbon regions, which is unusual and useful if reporting matters to you.

Scaling is granular and vertical as well as horizontal: per-container CPU/RAM/instance counts, independently for app and worker tiers. High availability is an option on applications and services. Environments pause automatically after 15 days of inactivity and only storage is billed while paused — a small, genuinely customer-friendly mechanic. Zero-downtime deploys with automatic health checks are standard.

The operational story is where the platform earns its keep: production-parity clones for every branch (data, services, routing included), infrastructure as code in git, per-team environment policies, built-in APM with continuous profiling, and 30 days of infrastructure metrics included in the project fee. For teams that ship PHP (Symfony, Drupal, WordPress), Node, Python, Ruby, or Go monoliths and microservices, the stack support is deep — the PHP/Symfony/Drupal heritage is still visible and is a genuine strength.

Reliability terms are unusually well documented. Every customer gets a best-efforts 99.5% monthly uptime commitment on production environments (excluding maintenance and customer-caused incidents). Contractual SLAs are add-ons: Advanced 99.90%, Premium 99.99%, both requiring a support add-on and a 12-month term, with a defined service-credit table and a termination right if uptime falls below 97% for three successive months. Enterprise contracts specify 99.90% for grid and 99.99% for dedicated projects.

Where it falls short

The cost stack is the recurring complaint. $9 per project, $10 per user, metered resources, $0.50/GB disk, backup storage, egress beyond 10 GB — and standard support at +10% of global spend. A small agency running five client projects with three developers can pass $100/month before compute does anything useful. If your workload is stable and your team is technical, plain VMs or a managed Kubernetes service will be cheaper; you are buying velocity and governance.

Second: complexity. The YAML configuration model is powerful and has a learning curve; debugging resource allocation and build behaviour requires understanding the platform's abstractions. The docs are good, but "PaaS" here is not "no-ops".

Third: the SLA structure. A 99.5% best-efforts baseline with paid add-ons for real guarantees is honest but means the headline "enterprise-grade" claim rests on add-on tiers. Read the service-specific terms before you assume 99.99%.

Fourth: vendor scale. Upsun is a ~290-person independent competing with hyperscaler PaaS offerings that can subsidise pricing indefinitely. The multi-cloud portability of the YAML config is the hedge, but the platform layer itself is proprietary.

Who should pick this

We would pick Upsun for mid-market and enterprise teams that ship frequently, need preview environments with real data, and have compliance checkboxes (PCI, SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA) that a DIY stack would take quarters to satisfy. It is our pick for PHP/Symfony/Drupal estates modernising off bespoke hosting, for EU organisations that need EU-region hosting on European providers (Paris on OVHcloud is a genuinely differentiated option), and for teams that want Git-auditable infrastructure.

We would not pick it for a personal project, for cost-optimised steady-state workloads, or for teams that already run a mature in-house Kubernetes platform — you would be paying twice.

Key takeaways

• Upsun is Platform.sh (rebranded September 2025): a Git-driven managed application platform with production-parity preview environments per branch.
• Multicloud across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, IBM Cloud and OVHcloud, with 16+ regions including EU options on OVHcloud, Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
• Pricing is provision-based: $9/project/month, $10/user/month, resources billed per second, disk $0.50/GB, backups $0.10/GB — plus standard support at +10% of global spend.
• 15-day free trial with an ongoing credit covering one project fee and one user license; no formal free tier.
• Uptime terms are explicit: 99.5% best-efforts for everyone, 99.90%/99.99% SLA add-ons with service credits and a below-97% termination right.
• Compliance (PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) and Git-auditable infrastructure are the enterprise case; cost and platform learning curve are the trade-offs.

Sources

• https://upsun.com/pricing/
• https://platform.sh/pricing
• https://upsun.com/blog/platformsh-evolves-into-upsun
• https://upsun.com/blog/revealing-upsun-a-new-paas-offering
• https://upsun.com/managed-application-platform
• https://upsun.com/trust-center/legal/service-specific-terms
• https://upsun.com/blog/heroku-vs-upsun/
• https://developer.upsun.com/docs/development/regions
• https://meta.upsun.com/regions
• https://linkedin.com/company/upsundotcom
• https://sota.io/blog/upsun-platform-sh-alternative-eu-paas-multi-cloud-jurisdiction-2026