Laravel is unique in that it has always had a lot of paid services based around it. There are a lot compared to other frameworks. If you go to Laravel's page you can see them all. One of my teams was using Forge and Envoyer probably 10 years ago.

And nobody complains because they are completely optional and Taylor Otwell's team puts so much effort into the framework.

> And nobody complains because they are completely optional and Taylor Otwell's team puts so much effort into the framework.

And the team also dogfoods heavily.

Laravel has excellent DX because the people building it use it to build those products.

Laravel started out as a PHP Rails-clone, no?

correct

It like Wordpress but without the drama.

The only thing WordPress and Laravel have in common is that both are written in PHP.

But if you've used Laravel, you know it's pleasant to write apps with it.

There are a couple of reasons but I can cite a few, I tried to push for PaaS and failed the hard way:

1. No widespread practice of environment provisioning automation. Today Docker and k8s are ubiquitous. Having a list of requirements your application needs well kept were hard to find - which Heroku needs. 2. In the same sense as above, automated deployment was not a common thing. 3. Barriers to cloud adoption. Development tools were not widespread. Paying for software development and deployment is common now, it wasn't.