Statamic's installation docs list Laravel Herd first, marked “Recommended” — and to be fair, free Herd genuinely serves a Statamic site. Statamic is flat-file at its core: a Laravel application that needs PHP and a web server, no database required. The catch arrives the moment your build becomes a real client site: form notification emails, a database for users or cache at scale, the right Node version for the frontend build — and on Herd, each of those is a Pro feature at $99/year. Here's what the free tier actually covers, where the wall is, and the free way around it.
What free Herd covers — honestly, quite a lot
Free Herdgives you PHP, nginx and .test domains with trusted HTTPS. For a flat-file Statamic site — content in Markdown and YAML, no users beyond yourself, no forms — that's a complete setup, and if that's your project, the official recommendation is good advice and you can stop reading.
Where the Pro wall appears
Real Statamic builds hit three of Herd's Pro gates quickly. Mailis the big one: Statamic's form notifications and password resets send email, and without local mail capture you're either testing against a real mailbox or not testing at all — capture is Pro on Herd (and on ServBay; the free tools are compared in our Mailpit guide). Databases arrive when you move users, cache or queues off the filesystem — one shared Pro instance on Herd. Node version management— for the Vite build every modern Statamic frontend runs — is Pro as well. None of this is a criticism of Herd's engineering; it's the free-tier boundary, and Statamic builds cross it early.
The free full-stack route
composer create-project statamic/statamic mysite
# add the folder to PortBay, press Play
# → https://mysite.test, PHP pinned, Mailpit catching form mailPortBay (free, open source, macOS) includes the pieces Herd gates: built-in Mailpit so every form notification lands in a local inbox, a per-project MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL database for the day you outgrow flat-file, and Node managed alongside PHP for the frontend build — plus trusted HTTPS on .test, same as Herd. The honest trade: Herd remains the most Laravel-polished tool in the category, it has a Windows build, and if you already pay for Pro the gates above are open. But “recommended by the docs” shouldn't cost $99/year to become usable for a site with a contact form. The switch guide covers moving an existing Herd setup across without breaking it, and the download is free — try it on one Statamic project next to Herd and keep whichever earns the spot.