Railway Pricing Calculator

How Railway pricing works in 2026

Railway uses resource-based pricing, not serverless metering. You pay for the vCPU and RAM your containers consume — billed per second — plus network egress and volume storage. CPU costs $20 per vCPU per month ($0.000463/vCPU/minute) and RAM costs $10 per GB per month ($0.000231/GB/minute). Egress costs $0.05 per GB. Volume storage costs $0.15 per GB per month.

The Pro plan costs $20/month per seat and includes $20 of resource usage. The Hobby plan costs $5/month and includes $5 of usage. Both plans bill resources above the included credit at the same per-second rates. Unlike Vercel and Netlify, Railway has no per-request charges, no edge request counts, and no bandwidth metering beyond egress — your cost is purely a function of how much compute you provision.

What surprises teams about Railway costs

The key insight with Railway is that idle containers still cost money. A 1 vCPU / 1 GB container running 24/7 costs $20 CPU + $10 RAM = $30/month regardless of how many requests it serves. That's great value when traffic is high (no per-request charges), but it's wasteful for sporadic workloads. Teams coming from serverless platforms are sometimes surprised to find Railway bills don't go to zero when traffic drops.

The second thing teams miss is multiple services. A typical Railway project runs a web service, a database, a Redis instance, and maybe a background worker. Each service has its own compute cost. A web app with a managed Postgres adds $10–40/month depending on the database instance size. This calculator models only the web service — add database and worker costs on top.

Railway pricing examples

Hobby project (5k visitors/mo): 0.5 vCPU + 0.5 GB RAM = $10 + $5 = $15 compute. Egress minimal. Covered entirely by the $5 Hobby credit plus small overage. ~$10–15/month all-in with a small Postgres.

Startup SaaS (50k visitors/mo): 1 vCPU + 1 GB RAM = $20 + $10 = $30 compute. After $20 Pro credit: $10 net overage. Plus Postgres at ~$10/mo. ~$40/month total.

Growing SaaS (250k visitors/mo): 2 vCPU + 4 GB RAM = $40 + $40 = $80 compute. After $20 credit: $60 net overage on top of $20 base. Plus Postgres and egress. ~$100–130/month total.

Scale (1.5M visitors/mo): 4+ vCPU + 8 GB RAM = $80+ CPU + $80 RAM = $160+ compute. Likely needs multiple instances behind a load balancer. Egress on 10 TB+ adds up. $300+/month.

How this calculator works

The calculator picks a recommended instance size (vCPU + RAM) based on your estimated monthly API request volume, then computes the monthly cost at Railway's published rates. Egress is based on your bandwidth estimate × $0.05/GB. Storage uses your static storage input × $0.15/GB. The $20 Pro included credit is applied as a deduction. Instance sizing is conservative — a real deployment should be right-sized against actual peak load metrics.

Caveats

Pricing verified as of May 2026 from Railway's documentation. Confirm current rates at railway.com/pricing. This calculator models one web service only. Database, Redis, background workers, and cron services each run as separate containers and add to the bill. Volume storage (persistent disks) is priced separately from egress.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Railway cost per month?

Railway Pro costs $20/month per seat and includes $20 of resource usage. A small 1 vCPU / 1 GB web service runs at $30/month in compute, so after the included credit you pay ~$10 in overage on top of the $20 base — roughly $30/month for the web service alone. Add database and other services on top.

Does Railway have a free tier?

Railway offers a one-time $5 trial credit with no credit card required. After that, the Hobby plan at $5/month includes $5 of resource usage. There is no permanently free tier — all plans have a monthly base cost and resource usage is billed on top.

Is Railway cheaper than Heroku?

For most workloads, yes. Railway's resource-based billing typically comes out cheaper than Heroku's dyno-based pricing, especially for apps that need more than one dyno type. Railway also supports more flexible instance sizing and bills per second rather than per hour.

Railway vs Render — which is cheaper?

It depends on the workload. Render uses fixed instance tiers (Starter $7, Standard $25, Pro $85) which can be more expensive for small apps but give more predictable billing. Railway's per-second resource model is cheaper at low utilization but can exceed Render at high compute usage. Use both calculators with the same workload preset to compare.