Railway — source summary
Railway’s official pricing page, fetched 2026-06-09. URL-only ingest. A usage-metered managed PaaS for deploying apps and databases — sibling of render and fly-io, contrast partner to raw IaaS (hetzner-cloud).
What it is
A deployment platform that charges per-second for the CPU, memory, and disk your services actually use — its banner promise is “No overprovisioning, no idle markup, no surprises.”
Pricing (volatile snapshot, re-verified 2026-08-10)
A subscription + usage hybrid, where the subscription fee is a usage credit:
- Free Trial: $5 of credits, 30 days, no card.
- Free: $0/month with $1 of monthly credits.
- Hobby: $5/month, which includes $5 of credits.
- Pro: $20/month per workspace, including $20 of credits.
- Enterprise: custom.
Metered rates, billed per second:
| Resource | Rate |
|---|---|
| Memory | $0.00000386 / GB-second (≈ $10.01 / GB-month) |
| CPU | $0.00000772 / vCPU-second (≈ $20.02 / vCPU-month) |
| Volumes | $0.00000006 / GB-second (≈ $0.16 / GB-month) |
| Egress | $0.05 / GB |
| Object storage | $0.015 / GB-month |
Still “Pay only for what your app uses, by the second. No overprovisioning, no idle markup.” Regions are not disclosed on the pricing page.
What changed since 2026-06-09: the June snapshot had no unit rates at all and described Pro as per seat; it is billed per workspace. A Free tier with $1/month of credits now exists alongside the trial. Converted to monthly, Railway’s $20.02 per vCPU-month is the number to compare against hetzner-cloud and the hyperscalers.
Positioning
Railway sits between fly-io (pure pay-as-you-go, no base fee, edge regions) and render (free tier that spins down): a low monthly floor + honest per-second metering, pitched at solo devs and side projects scaling into production. The trio Render/Railway/Fly is the managed-PaaS tier this spoke’s synthesis open questions asked about — distinct from the raw-IaaS tier of hetzner-cloud/oracle-cloud-free.