Railway
6.1/10Railway is a usage-billed cloud platform that deploys apps, databases and containers for developers and startups without them managing servers or Kubernetes.
Data last updated November 2026 · Our methodology
Overview
Railway is a platform-as-a-service from a San Francisco company founded in 2020 by Jake Cooper. Developers deploy services, databases and containers to it, and Railway handles provisioning and orchestration. It started on Google Cloud and moved onto its own co-located bare-metal hardware in 2024. It runs its own orchestration engine rather than Kubernetes, and includes logs, traces and metrics. You can deploy to four regions: California, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore. Object storage and isolated Linux sandbox VMs are also available. Pricing has two parts: a plan fee that includes the same amount of usage credit, plus per-second charges for what you use beyond that. A new account gets a 30-day trial with $5 of credit. After that there is a limited Free plan with $1 of monthly credit, Hobby at $5 a month, Pro at $20 per workspace, and custom Enterprise contracts. Usage costs about $20 per vCPU-month, $10 per GB of RAM per month, $0.15 per GB of volume storage and $0.05 per GB of egress. Plan limits cover projects, services, replicas, volume size, custom domains and how long logs are kept. Railway suits developers, startups and small SaaS teams who want to get running quickly and pay only for the resources they use. Railway is SOC 2 Type II certified. HIPAA BAAs, SSO, RBAC and audit logs are only available at higher spend levels. The main limitation is production reliability and support. Community threads describe stuck deploys, cron failures and networking problems. In May 2026 a platform-wide outage of about eight hours was attributed to Google Cloud suspending Railway's account. Pro support usually answers within 72 hours. Services that are not set to sleep are billed for their reserved resources even when idle.
Our Rating
Who Railway is best for
Good fit
The platform is built around developers deploying code and services with as little infrastructure work as possible.
A low starting price and per-second billing suit early teams, and the Series B coverage reports 25,000 businesses using it.
The $5 Hobby plan with usage credit fits solo builders running small projects.
Less suited
It works well for smaller SaaS products, but independent analysis questions its reliability for production apps with paying customers.
Enterprise contracts offer SLAs, HIPAA BAAs and SSO, but support and reliability complaints are a concern at that scale.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Billing is per second for the CPU, memory and storage you actually use, and the monthly plan fee comes back as usage credit.
- Developers can deploy services and databases without setting up Kubernetes or VMs themselves.
- SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 certified, with HIPAA BAAs available at higher spend.
- Logs, traces and metrics are built in, so a separate monitoring tool is not required to get started.
- Egress costs $0.05 per GB, which is low compared with hyperscalers.
Cons
- Community reports describe stuck deploys, 502 errors on fresh builds, and cron jobs that trigger but never start.
- In May 2026 a platform-wide outage of about eight hours was linked to Google Cloud suspending Railway's account.
- Pro support usually answers within 72 hours and does not help with application-level problems.
- Services that are not set to sleep are billed for their reserved RAM and CPU even when idle.
- Only four regions are available: two in the US, one in Europe and one in Asia.
Key Features
Not included
- Managed WordPress
- Managed Kubernetes
- Shared Hosting
Railway Pricing
Free
- 500 MB volume
- 3-day log history
- No custom domains
- 1 project, 3 services
- $1 monthly usage credit
- Up to 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB per service
Free Trial
- 500 MB volume
- 1 custom domain
- 7-day log history
- 2 projects, 5 services
- Up to 2 vCPU and 1 GB per service
- $5 one-time credit that expires after 30 days
Hobby
- 5 GB volume
- 2 custom domains
- Up to 6 replicas
- 7-day log history
- 3 members per project
- 50 projects, 50 services
- $5 usage included per month
- Up to 48 vCPU and 48 GB per service
Pro
- 1,000 GB volume
- 20 custom domains
- Unlimited members
- Up to 42 replicas
- 30-day log history
- 100 projects, 100 services
- Up to 1,000 vCPU and 1 TB RAM per service
- Price is per workspace, with $20 usage included per month
Enterprise
- SSO
- HIPAA BAA
- Custom limits
- Invoice billing
- Contractual SLAs
- Dedicated support
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. New accounts get a 30-day trial with a one-time $5 credit. After that, a limited Free plan includes $1 of usage each month.
You pay a plan fee ($5 for Hobby, $20 per workspace for Pro) that counts as usage credit. Usage beyond that is billed per second, at about $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB of RAM per month.
Railway is SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 certified. HIPAA BAAs are a paid add-on that requires a minimum monthly spend.
US West (California), US East (Virginia), EU West (Amsterdam) and Southeast Asia (Singapore).
The pricing page mentions contractual SLAs only for Enterprise and publishes no uptime figures.
No. According to TechTarget, Railway does not offer GPU hosting, though it has templates for running open-source models on CPUs.
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