Railway pricing plans
★★★★★ 4.8 CE

Railway Pricing: Plans & Cost Calculator 2026

From $1 to $20 per month across four plans, Railway scales from a low-cost entry tier to a $20 Pro minimum, with usage billed on top.

Railway interface screenshot

Railway plans and pricing

High· Verified July 16, 2026
Free

Free

Getting started + small apps

Free
30-day free trial with $5 credits
Up to 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per service
0.5 GB of volume storage
Community support
1 replica
Get started
Plan

Hobby

Hobbyist side projects

$5/mo
$5 of monthly usage credits included
Up to 6 replicas
Up to 48 GB RAM
Up to 48 vCPU
Up to 5 GB volume storage
Access to all Railway features
Community support
Choose Hobby
Plan

Pro

Professionals + teams

$20/mo
$20 of monthly usage credits included
Up to 42 replicas
Up to 1 TB RAM
Up to 1,000 vCPU
Up to 1 TB volume storage
Unlimited workspace seats
Railway Support
99.99% Availability Target
30-Day Log History
Concurrent global regions
Choose Pro
Custom

Enterprise

Scale + compliance

Custom
Custom pricing
Compliance
SLAs
Dedicated support
HIPAA BAA, SOC 2 compliance
Dedicated VMs
SSO, RBAC, audit logs
Up to 50 replicas
Up to 2.4 TB RAM
Up to 2,400 vCPU
Up to 5 TB volume storage
Contact sales

Railway pricing: the quick answer

Quick answerHigh· Verified July 16, 2026

Railway prices a flat minimum that converts into usage credits as of July 16, 2026. The Free plan is $1 a month after its 30-day trial, Hobby is a $5 monthly minimum, Pro is a $20 minimum, and Enterprise is custom. On Hobby and Pro the base fee comes back as usage credit, so light workloads pay just the minimum. Go over and Railway meters per second: memory at $0.00000386 per GB-second, CPU at $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, plus $0.05 per GB egress. Model the usage, not the plan.

  • FreeFree
  • Hobby$5/mo
  • Pro$20/mo
  • EnterpriseCustom
Run your numbers in the cost calculator: pick a plan, add your expected usage, and see the full monthly bill.
Free tier
No
Billing model
Usage-Based
Cheapest paid
$5/mo
Annual discount
Not offered

At $5/mo to start, Railway sits 58% below the $11.99/mo median across 19 cloud hosting tools we track.


Railway cost calculator

Railway Hidden Costs & Pitfalls

What sits on top of the plan fee

The plan fee is really a monthly minimum that turns into credit. Your real bill is per-second compute once you exhaust it, plus a couple of usage rates the plan does not mention.

Per-second compute past the included credit
Hobby includes $5 of usage and Pro includes $20; beyond that Railway meters memory at $0.00000386 per GB-second and CPU at $0.00000772 per vCPU-second. A single always-on 1 vCPU / 1 GB service running the full month lands well past the Hobby minimum, so the $5 figure is a floor for light use, not a cap.
$0.00000386/GB-s memory; $0.00000772/vCPU-s CPU
Egress and object storage
Service egress is $0.05 per GB, so a project pushing 100 GB of traffic in a month adds $5 on top of compute. Object storage is $0.015 per GB-month with free egress. Neither is bundled into the plan minimum, which is why a busy app can bill well above its $20 Pro floor.
$0.05/GB egress; $0.015/GB-mo storage
Free plan shrinks after the trial
The Free plan runs a 30-day trial with $5 of credit, then settles to $1 a month capped at one project, three services, 1 vCPU, and 0.5 GB of RAM. It is fine for a single small app, but the post-trial limits are tight enough that most real projects move to Hobby quickly.
$1/mo after trial
The renewal jump, credit expiry and every discount worth having are in the Railway true cost guide, with an email generator for negotiating team and enterprise rates.
Railway Cost Analysis

Railway pricing, read against its live plans and category

Positioning

$5/moentry price
58% below the category median
low $0.83median $11.99 · n=19high $35

Railway positions itself as a developer-friendly PaaS with a entry point of $5/mo for its Hobby plan, which is significantly below the category median of $11.99/mo. While the Free trial offers a $5 temporary credit, the Hobby and $20/mo Pro plans include matching monthly usage credits to offset compute costs. The platform provides generous resource ceilings on higher tiers, allowing developers to scale up to massive RAM and vCPU limits without immediately jumping to custom Enterprise contracts.

Cost drivers

  • 1Usage-based compute overages: The $5/mo and $20/mo plans only include credit equivalents; actual usage of RAM and vCPU beyond these credits is billed at utility rates.
  • 2Database storage limits: Volume storage is capped at 0.5 GB on Free, 5 GB on Hobby, and 1 TB on Pro, with additional storage requiring paid upgrades.
  • 3Database hosting accumulation: Running a continuous SQL database 24/7 quickly burns through the baseline $5 Hobby credit, leading to unexpected monthly bills.

Watch-outs

Users frequently express confusion over Railway's resource-based billing, noting that a 2 GB RAM and 2 Core machine can quickly scale to an unexpected $80/mo. Many warn that the entry-level pricing is a marketing hook that underestimates the continuous cost of running production databases.

Strengths

The Free plan at $1/mo offers automatic Nixpacks builds from your repo with no config files.

  • Automatic Nixpacks builds from your repo with no config files
  • Usage-based pricing scales from free tier to production loads
  • Integrated database services (Postgres, Redis) deploy in one click

What users say

Railway is much cheaper than Vercel and saved a lot of cost for us.

Reddit (positive)

unsure how long the free $5 plan will last in the railway.

Reddit (negative)

Editor’s take

The Hobby plan is ideal for indie hackers and prototyping, while the Pro plan suits growing startups wanting to avoid dedicated DevOps overhead. Teams requiring predictable, flat-rate infrastructure should consider DigitalOcean at $4/mo for standard virtual machines.

Oleh KemOleh KemFounder & Lead Analyst
ComparEdge EditorialUpdated: July 16, 2026

Railway price history


Price & Data Intelligence SyncLast verified: July 16, 2026 · CE-CLOUD-2026W23-1FCF6D · ✓ Pricing updated
Up to date

Cheaper Cloud Hosting tools


Frequently asked questions


Sources & verification

Verified by ComparEdgeMethod: Vendor docs, official pages, and selected independent sources
SourceWhat was checkedLast checked
Official Pricing PageSource of verified tiersJuly 16, 2026
Official WebsiteOfficial vendor website
G2G2 verified user reviews · 4.7/5 · 37 reviews
StackShareStackShare developer community

Every fact on this Railway pricing page is tied to a named source and a verification date. Freshness-sensitive figures trace to the sources above; verify against the vendor before relying on them.

Explore Railway

Every page on Railway in one place, you are on pricing.