Railway Pricing 2026: What It Actually Costs

Short answer: Railway has a permanent Free plan at $0/month with $1 of monthly usage credit, and paid plans at $5/month on Hobby or $20/month per workspace on Pro — and those subscription figures are credits rather than allowances, so the price is a floor, not a cap. Usage is metered per second at $20 per vCPU/month, $10 per GB of RAM/month, $0.05 per GB of egress and $0.15 per GB/month of volume storage. Once your usage exceeds the included credit, you pay the difference on top of the subscription.

TL;DR: The $5 and $20 figures are what people quote, but they are usage credits. A service that genuinely holds 1 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM around the clock prices at $30/month of resources on the published rates — six times the Hobby subscription. What saves most small projects is that Railway meters actual per-second consumption, and an idle web service uses a fraction of a vCPU.

Verified August 2026 against Railway's published pricing page and plans reference. Rates change; check the source before budgeting.

What Does Railway Cost?

The Free plan is permanent, and it is easy to miss. Railway's Trial gives a one-time $5 grant, and once 30 days pass or the $5 is spent it reverts to the Free plan rather than ending — Railway's docs put it plainly: "the free trial reverts to the Free plan, which provides $1 of free credit per month." A Free service is held to one replica, 0.5 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 1 GB of ephemeral storage and 0.5 GB of volume storage, so it is sized for a small always-on app rather than a real workload. But $1/month of credit against the published rates is roughly 36 hours of a full vCPU, or considerably more for something that idles — enough that plenty of hobby projects never pay Railway anything.

The structure is unusual enough to be worth stating twice: your subscription buys an equal amount of usage credit, not a capped plan. Hobby at $5/month includes $5 of resources. Use $12 of resources and you pay $12. No plan caps your spend by default — but you can cap it yourself. Railway supports a user-set hard usage limit (minimum $10) that takes every workload offline the moment you reach it, with email alerts at 75% and 90% along the way, on all subscription plans. It is opt-in, and Railway warns in its own docs that setting one is "a possibly destructive action as you're risking having all your resources shut down."

One thing Railway does better than most: Pro is priced per workspace, not per seat. Adding a fourth developer does not add $20/month, which is the opposite of how Vercel Pro works. If per-seat pricing is what pushed you to compare platforms, this is the difference that matters.

Railway's Resource Rates

Everything except egress and object storage is metered per second.

What that means in practice

The per-second metering is the whole story, and it cuts both ways.

Working the published rates for a sustained load: a service holding a full vCPU and 1 GB of RAM continuously for a month costs $20 + $10 = $30/month in resources, against a $5 Hobby subscription. That is arithmetic on Railway's own rates, not a benchmark — and it is the number to keep in mind before assuming "$5/month" is what a Railway project costs.

But sustained full utilisation is not what a typical web service does. Because billing is per second of actual consumption, a low-traffic app that idles most of the day consumes a small fraction of a vCPU and is genuinely cheap — often inside the included credit. This is why Railway feels inexpensive for side projects and gets expensive for anything with a constant floor of work: a background worker, a queue consumer, a database that must stay warm.

The practical rule: Railway prices work, not capacity. If your workload is bursty, that is in your favour. If it runs constantly, you are buying a server at a per-minute rate, and a flat-rate server will usually beat it.

Egress at $0.05/GB is worth a separate look if you serve large assets. A hundred gigabytes of downloads is $5 — the entire Hobby credit — before any compute.

When Railway Is the Right Choice

Genuinely, and this is not a throat-clearing before a pitch:

• Prototypes and side projects. Per-second billing on an idle app is hard to beat, and the deploy experience is excellent.
• Small teams. Per-workspace pricing means the third and fourth developers are free, which is unusual.
• Bursty workloads. You pay for the burst, not for the peak capacity year-round.

Where the model turns against you: anything with a constant resource floor, anything egress-heavy, and anything where you need a predictable monthly number rather than a variable one. Usage-based billing is a poor fit for a fixed budget.

The Self-Hosted Comparison

A VPS is the opposite trade: a flat monthly price for fixed capacity, whether you use it or not. At roughly $5–20/month for a machine that will run several small services, the crossover point comes quickly once you have more than one always-on process.

Temps is the self-hosted platform for that case — it deploys from git like Railway does, and bundles web analytics, session replay, error tracking, uptime monitoring and managed Postgres into a single Rust binary, so those are not separate subscriptions. It is free to self-host under Apache 2.0 and runs at about $6/month on your own VPS, with no per-seat and no per-second metering.

The trade, stated plainly: you operate the server, you handle patching and uptime, and you have fixed capacity rather than elastic capacity. Railway's default response to a traffic spike is to bill you for it; a VPS absorbs it by getting slow. That default is opt-out rather than fixed — set a hard usage limit and Railway takes the workloads offline instead — but you have to know the setting exists and pick a number, and picking one converts the surprise bill back into a surprise outage. If you would rather have an elastic bill than a hard ceiling, Railway's model is the one you want.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Railway cost per month?

$0 on the Free plan, $5/month on Hobby, or $20/month per workspace on Pro. Each includes an amount of usage credit, and resource usage beyond that credit is billed on top.

Is Railway free?

Yes, in a limited way. Railway has a permanent Free plan at $0/month providing $1 of usage credit per month, which does not roll over, on a single replica capped at 0.5 GB of RAM and 1 vCPU. New accounts start on a Trial with a one-time $5 grant, and that Trial reverts to the Free plan once 30 days pass or the $5 is spent. Hobby at $5/month is the practical floor for anything beyond a very small app.

Is Railway's $5 plan a cap on what I can spend?

No. It is a credit. Hobby includes $5 of resource usage per month; consumption above that is charged in addition to the subscription. If you want a real cap, set a hard usage limit — minimum $10 — which takes your workloads offline when you reach it.

What are Railway's resource rates?

$20 per vCPU/month, $10 per GB of RAM/month, $0.05 per GB of network egress, and $0.15 per GB/month of volume storage. Everything except egress and object storage is metered per second.

Does Railway charge per seat?

No. Pro is $20/month per workspace, so adding team members does not increase the subscription.

Why is my Railway bill higher than $5?

Most often a service with a constant resource floor. Per-second metering is cheap for an idle app, but a process holding a full vCPU and 1 GB of RAM all month prices at $30 in resources on the published rates.