You didn't finish reading the article. The $9 gets you unlimited setup/configuration/management of servers and projects. You separately pay for the servers at y

You didn't finish reading the article. The $9 gets you unlimited setup/configuration/management of servers and projects. You separately pay for the servers at your host of choice. His example is the $9 at Laravel Forge + $10 server at Linode. The $9 is a convenience package for managing things, not including the cost of hosting itself. Of course if your load is small, you can host multiple projects on a single server. So you don't need to pay for a $10 Linode per project, unlike what people do with Heroku where you pay the full hosting cost per project.