Railway vs Self-hosted VPS

Side-by-side cost comparison — enter your workload and see which platform is cheaper for your traffic.

1. Pick a workload

Choose the preset closest to your project size.

2. Fine-tune (optional)

Override the preset values with your real numbers.

Self-hosted VPS is cheaper by $45.00/mo (75%) for this workload. Switch presets or adjust the numbers above to see how the gap changes at different scales.

RailwayPro

$60.00/mo
Pro plan (3 seats)
$20/seat × 3 — includes $60 total resource credit
$60.00
Compute — 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM
$20.00 CPU + $10.00 RAM
$30.00
Network Egress
214.6 GB × $0.05/GB
$10.73
Volume Storage
5 GB × $0.15/GB-mo
$0.75
Included Resource Credit
$60 credit applied
$-41.48
Instance recommendation: 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM for your workload. Adjust in the advanced panel if your real instance is larger or smaller. Estimate uses 3 seats (editable in advanced panel). No per-seat charge on Cloudflare, Netlify, or Render. Railway charges no per-request fees. Costs are purely compute + egress + storage — predictable scaling behavior. Database not included in this estimate. If you use Railway's managed Postgres add it at $10-40/mo depending on instance size.
Rates verified 2026-05 — Railway pricing page

Self-hosted VPSVPS

Lower cost
$15.00/mo
VPS — medium (2 dedicated vCPU, 8 GB RAM)
App server + cache + background workers
$15.00
Cloudflare CDN + R2
Free tier handles most workloads
incl.
Database — add-on
Optional: managed DB ~$25/mo for managed Postgres, Auth, Storage (+$25/mo if needed)
incl.
Add a managed database (+$25/mo) for Postgres, Auth, Storage, and Realtime. Or run Postgres on the same VPS for free. You take on patching, monitoring, and backups — budget ~2–4 hours/month. Add ~$5–15/mo for managed monitoring (Better Stack, Sentry) and email (Resend) if you want them off your plate.
Rates verified 2026-05 — Self-hosted VPS pricing page

What Railway excels at

  • Container-based (not serverless) — no cold starts, consistent latency.
  • Run your database, Redis, and background workers on the same platform.
  • Hobby plan at $5/month is excellent value for solo projects; Pro at $20/seat for teams.
  • Scale-to-zero on staging environments keeps development costs near zero.
  • Runs on Railway Metal (own hardware), not AWS — more pricing control and expanding global regions.

What Self-hosted VPS excels at

  • Lowest cost per unit of compute — a $15/mo VPS outperforms a $85/mo Render Pro instance on raw CPU.
  • No per-request, per-invocation, or egress charges — traffic spikes are free.
  • Full control: custom runtimes, native cron, WebSockets, long-running processes, any Node.js version.
  • Run your database, cache, and app on one server — no inter-service network latency or egress costs.
  • No vendor lock-in — switch providers with a single rsync + DNS change.
Compatible

MakerKit deploys to Railway and Self-hosted VPS

Next.js 16 App Router with Dockerfile included — deploy to your preferred hosting platform without touching config.

Get MakerkitOne-time $349 — yours forever

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