I haven't interacted with it, either. "Engineered into it" would be too strong a phrasing, but it's hard not to get the impression Laravel's creator(s) really, really want you to use their other services. I mean, compare the menu bars of rubyonrails.org, djangoproject.com, and laravel.com: Rails's first links are "blogs" and "guides"; Django's first links are "overview" and "download"; Laravel's first links are "Forge" (their commercial provisioning service) and "Vapor" (their "serverless" deployment platform).

I take your point and I understand that you could get that impression looking at the website; they have stuff to sell.

There's also more of a market for some of that stuff, and the reason is the huge proliferation of different PHP execution environments. PHP runs in more places and there are more opportunities to help correct for the limitations of those environments (with log monitoring tools and the like).

(Also -- contrarywise as they say -- PHP does _not_ run first-class in some serverless environments; you need a custom execution environment for PHP in Lambda. So there's an opportunity there.)

But as a developer experience it is really not commercialised at all. I do not look at or think of any of those things, and I've not encountered any significant upselling. I'd forgotten all about Forge until you mentioned it! (And will now revisit it)

This is totally fair. A few years back I worked on a Laravel project when both me and the other dev were fairly new to Laravel, and neither of us were particularly adept sysadmins. Forge was a life-saver when it came time to deploy.

Now that I'm _much_ more experienced with Linux server management, I found a mix of Laravel's official deployment docs and some community tutorials more than enough to spin up my Laravel apps on Digital Ocean.

I think that Laravel providing Forge as an official happy path for deployment is to the benefit of newer Laravel developers. I've listened to the hosts of the Django Chat Podcast lament about deployment being a big hurdle for newer Django developers. I'm glad that Laravel has an easy button. As someone who is now more experienced, I'm also glad that I don't feel forced to use Forge and other services by the Laravel team. I might use it again at some point though.