Railway
Simple deploys for backend services, databases, and workers.
- Free credit
- $5
- Credit window
- 30 days
- Card required
- No
Railway scores 4.5/10 for free value in Apps. The main constraint: One-time $5 / 30-day Trial, then an ongoing Free plan with $1/month of recurring credit (1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM / 0.5 GB volume per service).
Free value score
4.5 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
What you get
One-time $5 / 30-day Trial, then an ongoing Free plan with $1/month of recurring credit (1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM / 0.5 GB volume per service).
Fast backend prototype with normal server process.
Gotchas
- Trial credit expires in 30 days
The one-time $5 Trial credit grant expires 30 days after signup. After it expires you remain on the ongoing Free plan, which grants $1 of usage credit every month.
- $1/month recurring free credit
After the one-time $5 Trial, the ongoing Free plan ($0/month) grants $1 of usage credit each month. That covers only a small always-on service, but the allowance regenerates monthly rather than expiring permanently.
- 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per service
The ongoing Free plan caps each deployed service at 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB RAM (the 30-day Trial allows 2 vCPU / 1 GB) — enough for a light prototype but not production workloads.
- 0.5 GB volume storage
Persistent volume storage is capped at 0.5 GB on the Free and Trial tiers.
- Community support only
Trial users receive community-level support only; no SLA, no Railway staff support, no log history beyond basics.
- No availability SLA
The trial tier carries no uptime SLA; the 99.9% availability target is a paid-plan feature.
- No log history guarantee
7-day log history is listed as a Hobby feature; the trial tier has no stated log retention.
Sources
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"Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 per month · Up to 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per service · 0.5 GB of volume storage · Community support"
https://railway.com/pricing -
"After 30 days passes or $5 is spent, the free trial reverts to the Free plan, which provides $1 of free credit per month. The credit does not roll over month to month."
https://docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial -
"Memory $0.00000386 per GB / sec · CPU $0.00000772 per vCPU / sec · Volumes $0.00000006 per GB / sec"
https://railway.com/pricing -
"Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round"
https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/railway-secures-usd100-million-to-challenge-aws-with-ai-native-cloud
