Platform.sh Review 2026: Now Upsun - Fixed vs Flex Pricing, Limits and the Fine Print

The short verdict

Platform.sh, now Upsun, is still one of the strongest platforms for teams that want every Git branch to become a full, working copy of production, with its databases and files cloned, not just its code. It runs on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM and OVHcloud, offers a long list of managed services, and carries SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS Level 1 and ISO 27001 compliance.

The catch is the bill. Flex looks cheap per hour, but Standard support is applied by default at +10% of global spend, uptime SLAs add 20% or 45% on top and require a paid support upgrade, and every preview environment consumes billable resources. Fixed is easier to predict but packs modest CPU and RAM into each tier. Cancellation is immediate and deletes backups, and there is no phone support.

• Best for: agencies and product teams running PHP, Python, Node.js or Java apps with real data, who need many review environments and compliance paperwork.
• Less suited to: hobby projects, a single static site, or anyone who wants a free tier that lasts beyond a 15-day trial.
• Price to start: Flex project fee €9 per month plus resources and €10 per user; Fixed plans from €12.25 (development only) and €22 per month (Essential).

What happened to Platform.sh

The rename was announced by the CEO on 23 September 2025. A press release from the same day puts the company's headquarters in Paris and San Francisco, its staff at 290+ people, and its user base at "6,000 enterprises and 16,000 developers". Those figures are the company's own.

For existing customers the message was that nothing changes: "Your current pricing plan stays the same", "Your projects, workflows, and integrations remain untouched" and "Your account, billing, and contract terms are unchanged". In practice the old Platform.sh plans are now called Upsun Fixed. A partner, Pimcore, summed it up as "your current Platform.sh environments = Upsun Fixed", with no migration or downtime required.

Alongside Fixed, Upsun sells Upsun Flex, which the company describes as a model that lets you "pay only for the resources you provision". Flex and Fixed share the same underlying platform but use different configuration files, different docs sites and different price lists.

Where the old addresses go

• platform.sh redirects to upsun.com.
• platform.sh/pricing redirects to Upsun's pricing pages.
• docs.platform.sh redirects to fixed.docs.upsun.com, the Fixed documentation.
• docs.upsun.com redirects to developer.upsun.com/docs, the Flex documentation.
• The help centre still lives at support.platform.sh, but its articles now say Upsun.

How Platform.sh works: branches become environments

The idea that made Platform.sh popular is unchanged. An environment is tied to a Git branch. In Upsun's words, new environments "can be created in moments through a Git clone" and are "an exact replica of their parent environments". That means a feature branch gets its own running copy of the app, its own database cloned from production, and its own files, so testers review real behaviour rather than a mock.

Infrastructure is declared in YAML that lives in the repository. Flex projects use a single .upsun/config.yaml file. Fixed projects keep the classic Platform.sh layout: .platform.app.yaml for the app and .platform/services.yaml for services. Moving between the two means rewriting that configuration, not just changing a billing setting.

Languages and managed services

Supported runtimes are C#/.NET Core, Elixir, Go, Java, JavaScript/Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby and Rust. Managed services include PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, Oracle MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Valkey, Memcached, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Kafka, RabbitMQ, InfluxDB, Varnish, Vault KMS, Gotenberg and network storage. ClickHouse appears in the Flex docs only.

That breadth is the main reason teams choose it over simpler platforms: a Drupal or Magento site with MySQL, Redis, Solr and Varnish can be described in one file and cloned per branch without stitching together third-party add-ons.

Upsun Flex pricing: pay per second for what you allocate

Flex bills resources "per second on their allocation". The hourly prices Upsun lists are estimates over 732 hours a month. Allocation is what matters: you pay for the CPU and RAM you assign to each app and service in each environment, whether or not the app is busy.

Fixed monthly fees

• Project fee: €9.00 per project per month. It includes 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 and 500,000 ingress requests.
• Users: €10.00 per user per month. Viewers are not charged. Advanced user management adds €9.00 per user per month.
• First-project offer: Upsun says new accounts "save up to $19/month", the equivalent of the first user licence and first project fee, with terms applying.

Compute (hourly, per unit)

• Applications: shared CPU €0.033, guaranteed CPU €0.100, memory €0.013 per GB.
• Tasks (workers and crons): shared CPU €0.033, memory €0.013 per GB.
• Services (databases, caches, search): shared CPU €0.049, guaranteed CPU €0.120, memory €0.020 per GB.
• Premium memory: MongoDB €0.05 per GB and Elasticsearch €0.19 per GB, both requiring a minimum commitment.

Over a full month, one shared application CPU works out to roughly €24, one GB of application RAM to roughly €9.50, one shared service CPU to roughly €36 and one GB of service RAM to roughly €14.60.

Storage, bandwidth and builds

• Disk: €0.49 per GB per month, billed per environment.
• Backups: €0.10 per GB per month.
• Object storage: €0.0833 per GB per month with a 512 GB minimum per environment; object storage backups €0.075 per GB. Not available on trial projects.
• Extra egress: €0.03 per GB. Extra ingress requests: €1.00 per 100,000.
• Extra build time: €0.033 per CPU-hour and €0.013 per GB-hour.
• Real-time log forwarding: €0.10 per GB. Continuous profiling beyond 15 minutes and 30 days: €4.89 per month add-on.

Fastly CDN and security add-ons

Fastly is sold as metered add-ons: CDN at €0.094 per GB and €0.188 per 100,000 requests, a basic WAF from €85.00 per million requests (falling to €24.00 beyond 3 million), a configurable WAF at €445.00 flat for up to 2 million requests, image optimisation at €56.00 per 10 million, rate limiting at €52.00, TLS at €8.50 for 1 to 5 certificates, customer-generated TLS at €187.00 and DDoS protection at €169.00.

Payment is monthly by card or SEPA. Volume plans, prepayment and custom invoicing start above roughly $1,000 a month, and Enterprise is a sales conversation.

Upsun Fixed pricing: the old Platform.sh plans

Fixed is the tiered model Platform.sh customers already know. Each plan sets the CPU and RAM of the production environment and includes 1 user, 3 development environments and 5 GB of storage per environment. These are the Professional prices as listed in May 2026.

• Development: €12.25 per month, development environments only.
• Essential: 0.65 vCPU and 0.65 GB RAM, €22.00 per month.
• Standard: 0.96 vCPU and 0.75 GB RAM, €45.00 per month (High Memory with 2 GB RAM, €54.00).
• Medium: 2.09 vCPU and 3 GB RAM, €112.50 per month (4 GB RAM, €135.00).
• Large: 4.11 vCPU and 6 GB RAM, €224.75 per month (8 GB RAM, €269.75).
• X-Large: 8.22 vCPU and 12 GB RAM, €449.75 per month (16 GB RAM, €539.50).
• 2X-Large: 16.44 vCPU and 24 GB RAM, €899.25 per month (32 GB RAM, €1,079.25).
• Dedicated: 6 to 192+ dedicated CPUs, price on request.

Fixed extras

• Extra users: €11.00 each.
• Extra development environments: €16.50 per block of 3. They can only be added in multiples of 3.
• Extra storage: €2.20 per 5 GB per environment. Above 100 GB you open a support ticket, and you cannot reduce storage yourself.
• Automated backups: €1.00 per GB.

Enterprise and Elite tiers are quoted by sales. They add 99.9% to 99.99% uptime commitments, urgent-ticket response of 1 hour (Enterprise) or 30 minutes (Elite) around the clock, and 1 TB of Fastly egress plus 50 million CDN requests per month. Overage is listed at €155 per extra TB of origin egress, €65 per TB of edge egress and €49 per extra 50 million requests.

The hidden multipliers: support, SLA and HIPAA

The Flex hourly rates are only part of the bill. Several percentage surcharges are applied on top, and they compound.

• Standard support: applied by default at +10% of global spend, with 4-hour best-effort response on urgent tickets.
• Advanced support: +15% of global spend, 1-hour guaranteed response, 12-month minimum term.
• Premium support: +19% of global spend, 30-minute guaranteed response, 12-month minimum term.
• 99.9% uptime SLA: +20% of project value. 99.99% uptime SLA: +45% of project value. Both require Advanced support or higher.
• HIPAA: +25% of project value, 12-month minimum.

So a project that needs a contractual 99.99% SLA pays the resource bill, plus 45% for the SLA, plus at least 15% for the support tier the SLA depends on, and commits to a year. That is normal for enterprise hosting, but it is easy to miss when comparing hourly CPU prices with other platforms.

There is one discount: deploying to one of six greener regions, defined as below 100 g CO2e per kWh, earns a 3% sustainability credit on resource usage.

What a small Flex project might cost

As a rough illustration only, take a single production environment with one app on half a shared CPU and 1 GB of RAM, a PostgreSQL service on a quarter of a shared CPU and 0.5 GB of RAM, 5 GB of disk and one paid user.

• Project fee: €9.00
• App: 0.5 CPU (about €12.10) plus 1 GB RAM (about €9.50)
• PostgreSQL: 0.25 CPU (about €9.00) plus 0.5 GB RAM (about €7.30)
• Disk: 5 GB at €0.49, about €2.45
• One user: €10.00
• Subtotal: about €59, plus 10% default Standard support, about €65 a month

The first-project offer can take up to the equivalent of $19 a month off that. Every preview environment you keep running adds its own allocated resources and disk, so a team with five open branches each cloning production can multiply the compute line. Idle Flex environments pause after 15 days of inactivity, after which only their storage is billed.

The closest Fixed equivalent, Standard at €45 a month, gives 0.96 vCPU and 0.75 GB of RAM in production, 3 development environments and 5 GB per environment, with a fixed bill. Fixed suits a stable site; Flex suits teams whose size and branch count change month to month.

Features worth paying for

Multi-cloud and regions

Projects run on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud or OVHcloud, with regions across Europe, North America and Australia. For European companies that want to keep data with a European provider, the OVHcloud option and French, German and Swiss regions are a real differentiator. A carbon dashboard shows region intensity, but only for AWS, GCP and Azure.

Autoscaling

The Upsun console has a "Configure autoscaling" screen with CPU thresholds, cool-down periods and instance limits, so production can scale out under load instead of being sized for peak all month.

Observability

Every Flex project includes 30 days of infrastructure metrics and a short window of continuous profiling. The pricing page lists Blackfire APM and profiling for PHP and Python, which is the same tooling Platform.sh customers used before the rename.

AI and agent tooling

Upsun's docs show an MCP server at mcp.upsun.com that lets an AI coding tool such as Cursor list and manage projects. It is a sign of where the platform is heading rather than a reason to buy on its own.

Compliance

Upsun says it holds SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS Level 1 and ISO 27001, adds FS Cloud certification, and supports GDPR and CCPA compliance. HIPAA is available as the paid add-on described above. On deletion, storage is wiped following NIST 800-88, and all projects except those on the FR-3 region use encrypted volumes.

The fine print

• Cancellation is immediate and irreversible. Upsun's help centre says it "removes access to the project" and that "any data associated with the project will be deleted, including backups". Export your database and files first.
• Billing is prorated per second, and costs for a cancelled project are charged at the end of the month. We found no money-back guarantee.
• There is "no way to pause billing while a project is archived or inactive". Flex auto-pauses idle environments, which stops compute charges, but storage is still billed.
• On Fixed you cannot reduce storage yourself, and storage above 100 GB needs a support ticket.
• Upsun Support "does not provide phone support". Help is by ticket.
• Deleting your whole account is also done by support ticket.
• The free trial lasts 15 days, needs no credit card and includes credit for one project fee and one user licence, but object storage is not available on trial projects.

Platform.sh vs other PaaS options

Compared with the other platforms we have reviewed, Upsun sits at the enterprise, agency-friendly end of the market.

• Heroku (/heroku-review): a similar Git-push workflow and a large add-on marketplace, but review apps do not clone production data the way Upsun environments do.
• Render (/render-review): simpler flat plans and a cheaper start for small apps, with fewer managed services and less compliance depth.
• Fly.io (/fly-io-review): strong for running containers close to users worldwide, but you assemble more of the stack yourself.
• Railway (/railway-review): fast, usage-based and pleasant for small teams, with lighter enterprise features.
• Vercel (/vercel-review) and Netlify (/netlify-review): built for frontends and serverless functions rather than full PHP, Java or Python backends with their own databases.

If your app is a stateful CMS or e-commerce site and your team works in branches that need real data, Upsun is the strongest fit of this group. If you mostly deploy a frontend or a single small service, one of the simpler platforms will cost less.

Who should use Platform.sh (Upsun)

• Agencies hosting many Drupal, Magento, Symfony, Laravel, WordPress or Pimcore sites that need consistent review environments.
• Product teams that want each pull request tested against a clone of production data and services.
• Companies that need SOC 2, PCI, ISO 27001 or HIPAA paperwork and a choice of cloud provider, including European ones.
• Existing Platform.sh customers: nothing forces a move. Your Fixed plan, contract and workflow carry on as before.

Skip it if you want a permanent free tier, phone support, or a bill you can understand at a glance without accounting for support and SLA percentages.

Frequently asked questions

Is Platform.sh still available?

Yes, under the Upsun name. Platform.sh became Upsun on 23 September 2025, and the old Platform.sh plans continue as Upsun Fixed with the same pricing, contracts and workflows.

What is the difference between Upsun Fixed and Upsun Flex?

Fixed is tiered: you pick a plan size such as Standard at €45 a month. Flex is usage-based: a €9 project fee, €10 per user and per-second billing for the CPU, RAM and disk you allocate to each environment.

Is support included in the price?

Not for free on Flex. Standard support is applied by default at +10% of global spend, Advanced costs +15% and Premium +19%, both with a 12-month minimum.

Is there a free trial or free tier?

There is a 15-day free trial with no credit card, covering one project fee and one user licence. There is no permanent free tier, and object storage is not available during the trial.

Can I pause billing on a project I am not using?

No. Upsun says billing cannot be paused for archived or inactive projects. Flex environments auto-pause after 15 days without activity, which stops compute charges, but storage is still billed.

What happens to my data if I cancel?

It is deleted immediately, including backups, and cancellation cannot be undone. Export databases and files first; you are billed prorated for the time the project ran.

Do I need to migrate my Platform.sh project to Upsun?

No. Existing projects are Upsun Fixed projects with no migration or downtime. Moving to Flex is optional and means converting your .platform configuration to a single .upsun/config.yaml file.

Does Upsun offer phone support?

No. Support is ticket-based, with response targets from 4 hours best effort on Standard down to 30 minutes guaranteed on Premium or Elite.

Key takeaways

• Platform.sh is now Upsun. The old plans live on as Upsun Fixed; Upsun Flex adds per-second, usage-based billing.
• Its standout feature is still branch environments that clone code, data and services from production.
• Flex starts at €9 per project and €10 per user plus resources, but Standard support adds 10% of global spend by default.
• Uptime SLAs cost +20% or +45% and require Advanced support with a 12-month term.
• Cancellation deletes backups immediately, inactive projects keep billing for storage, and there is no phone support.