Railway Pricing in 2026: Free, Hobby and Pro Explained

Railway pricing is a monthly plan fee plus metered usage, and the paid plan fees count toward that usage. The Free plan costs $0 and gives $1 of usage a month, Hobby costs $5 a month with $5 of usage included, and Pro costs $20 a month with $20 included. Above that you pay $20 per vCPU per month, $10 per GB of memory per month, $0.15 per GB of volume storage per month and $0.05 per GB of egress, measured on what your services actually use.

New accounts start with a 30 day trial that carries a one-time $5 credit and needs no card. In the worked example below, one small always-on app with a PostgreSQL database uses about $8.65 of resources a month, which means a bill of $8.65 on Hobby and $20 on Pro.

Prices and limits in this guide were checked on November 12, 2026 against railway.com/pricing and Railway's plans documentation. Railway changes its pricing from time to time, so confirm on those pages before you commit.

Railway plans at a glance

Railway has four plans plus a trial. Every account needs an active subscription, and the Hobby and Pro fees work as a minimum spend: the fee is credited against your usage, so you pay the fee or your usage, whichever is higher.

Source: railway.com/pricing and Railway plans, checked on November 12, 2026. The CPU and memory figures are the most a service can use across all its replicas. A single replica tops out at 8 vCPU and 8 GB on Hobby, 24 vCPU and 24 GB on Pro, and 48 vCPU and 48 GB on Enterprise.

Railway usage rates

Railway has no instance sizes to choose from. A service scales up to its plan's limits on its own, and you pay for the memory, CPU, storage and traffic it actually consumes. There is no separate database price: a PostgreSQL service is billed like any other service, for its memory, CPU and volume.

Source: Railway plans and bucket billing, checked on November 12, 2026.

Two newer products bill on different terms. Sandboxes and other workloads on Railway's VM primitive cost $50 per GB of memory and $50 per vCPU per month, metered per second. The Railway Agent, its AI assistant, is billed on the LLM tokens it uses at the model provider's price. Both draw from the same included credit as the rest of your plan.

How Railway bills over a month

• Granularity. The pricing page quotes rates per second, while the docs and the invoice count per minute (the invoice line reads "vCPU (per vCPU / min)"). In both cases a service that runs for half a month costs about half.
• Idle time is billed. Railway's billing guide says you pay for resources a running service holds, not for traffic. An app with no visitors still pays for the memory it keeps loaded.
• Fee in advance, overage in arrears. Each invoice charges the plan fee for the coming month and any usage above the included amount from the month that just ended.
• No rollover. Included usage resets every billing cycle. Using $2 on Hobby this month does not give you $8 next month.
• Small balances wait. An invoice under $0.50 is marked paid and the amount moves to the next invoice.
• Cards only. Hobby and Pro need a credit card. Railway may also charge part of a bill early in the cycle as a fraud check.

Is Railway free? The trial and the Free plan

Railway has a free trial and a free plan, but neither keeps a typical app and database running for a full month.

The trial. A new account gets a one-time $5 credit that expires after 30 days, with no credit card needed. During the trial a service can use up to 2 vCPU and 1 GB of memory, and a project can hold 5 services. If Railway verifies your connected GitHub account, you get the full trial. If it cannot, you get a limited trial with restricted outbound network access and only some ports available. Verification is automatic and depends on things like the age and activity of the GitHub account.

The Free plan. When the 30 days pass or the $5 is spent, the account moves to the Free plan: $0 a month with $1 of usage credit that does not roll over. One project, three services, 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB of memory per service, 0.5 GB of volume storage and no custom domains. At $10 per GB-month, the $1 credit covers about 100 MB of memory held for a full month, with nothing left for CPU. That suits a small bot or a cron job, not an always-on web app with a database.

Without an account. Running ssh railway.new gives you a free Linux VM (2 vCPU, 2 GB) with a preview URL and no sign-up. You have 24 hours to claim it into an account, or it is deleted.

The Hobby plan is not free. Railway's FAQ is explicit: you always pay the $5 fee, even if you use less. Railway does waive the Hobby fee for a small set of active builders, but eligibility is assessed automatically and it does not take requests.

If all you need is a database that costs nothing, our guide to free PostgreSQL hosting options compares the permanent free tiers.

Railway Hobby plan vs Pro plan

Usage costs the same on both plans. The difference is the minimum and the limits. On Pro you pay at least $20 even when you use $8 of resources. Once your usage passes $20 a month, both plans charge the same amount for the same usage, and Pro's higher minimum stops costing you anything extra.

Source: railway.com/pricing, checked on November 12, 2026. The availability targets come from the pricing page. Railway's database docs say it does not publish an uptime SLA today.

Hobby fits one developer with side projects. Pro is the plan for a team, for anything that needs more than 5 GB on a volume, or for more than two custom domains.

How much does Railway cost for an app and a database?

Railway's cost depends on what your services actually use, so any estimate needs assumptions. This example uses the API service from Railway's own right-sizing guide: 0.36 GB of memory on average, 0.05 vCPU on average and 20 GB of egress a month. The PostgreSQL service is lightly used: we assume 0.25 GB of memory, 0.02 vCPU and 1 GB of data, with the app connecting over the private network so database traffic is not egress. Both run all month.

Rates from Railway plans, checked on November 12, 2026. Usage figures are assumptions for a 30 day month.

On the Free plan, the $1 credit would cover about three and a half days of this usage. Builds are free, so pushing ten deploys a day adds nothing to the total.

Your own numbers can differ a lot. Railway's guide puts the idle memory of a typical Node or Python web service at 100 to 400 MB, and memory is the biggest line here. Four things move this bill most often:

• Memory growth. A dependency that adds 200 MB of resident memory costs $2 per month per replica, and a memory leak grows the bill until the service restarts.
• The public database URL. Connecting with DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL instead of DATABASE_URL sends database traffic through the public network, where it is billed as egress.
• PR environments. With PR deploys on, each open pull request runs a copy of your services and bills like one.
• Backups. Volume backups are incremental and billed at the volume rate, but only for data that is not already in the volume or another backup.

What changes as you grow

Usage pricing means each step up shows on the bill right away. These are the steps most small projects take first, priced from the example above.

A second app replica. Replicas multiply the memory and CPU lines. Two replicas of the app raise its cost from $5.60 to $10.20, and the total to $13.25: a $13.25 bill on Hobby and still $20 on Pro. A service with a volume cannot run replicas, so this applies to the app, not the database.

More traffic. Egress is $0.05 per GB, so 100 GB a month adds $5 and 1 TB adds $50. For a site that serves large files, egress can become the largest line.

High availability PostgreSQL. Converting PostgreSQL to a high availability cluster adds, by default, 2 streaming replicas, 3 etcd nodes and 3 HAProxy instances. Each one runs with its own memory and CPU, and the database and etcd nodes each get a volume. That at least triples the PostgreSQL lines before you count etcd and HAProxy. If you revert, the extra volumes stay in the project and keep billing until you delete them.

Point-in-time recovery. PITR has no fee of its own. It bills the WAL uploads as egress and the archive as bucket storage. Railway's docs expect a few GB of compressed WAL a day under steady writes and call idle databases nearly free. At 2 GB a day, that is about 60 GB of egress ($3.00) a month, and an archive that settles around four weeks of WAL, about 56 GB ($0.84).

A team. Hobby is a single developer workspace with up to 3 members per project. A shared team workspace means Pro, which includes unlimited seats for the $20 minimum.

Enterprise features. Railway ties them to a committed monthly spend: $1,000 for HIPAA BAAs, $2,000 for SSO, role-based access control and longer audit logs, $5,000 for enterprise support and larger replicas, and $10,000 for dedicated VMs.

For the costs that never appear on a hosting invoice, such as the hours spent on setup and maintenance, see our guide to the true cost of cloud deployment.

How to keep a Railway bill under control

Railway gives you four controls, described in its cost control docs:

1. Usage limits. Set an email alert and a hard limit on the workspace usage page. Railway emails you at 75%, 90% and 100% of the hard limit, and at 100% it takes all workloads offline. The lowest hard limit you can set is $10.
2. Replica limits. Cap the CPU and memory each replica may use. A limit set too low crashes the service instead of billing more, so base it on the peaks in your metrics.
3. Private networking. Service to service traffic over the private network is not billed as egress.
4. Serverless. Railway can put a service to sleep after 5 to 10 minutes without outbound traffic. The first request after that wakes it with a cold start and may return a 502. Open database connections and telemetry count as traffic and keep the service awake.

To estimate before you commit, Railway suggests deploying on the trial or Hobby, letting the project run for a week and reading the estimated usage on the workspace usage page.

How Out Plane prices the same setup

Out Plane uses a different model: you pick an instance size, and it is billed per minute while it runs, whatever its load. Each plan includes an amount of usage. Starter is $9 a month and includes $9 of usage. Pro is $29 a month and includes $15. Growth is $299 a month and includes $150, and Enterprise is custom. Starter and Pro both start with a 14 day free trial. There is no free plan.

The smallest instance, op-20 (0.5 vCPU, 512 MB), is $0.0000694 per minute, which is $3.00 for a 30 day month. A managed PostgreSQL database is $6 per month and includes automated backups, point-in-time recovery, read replicas and connection pooling. Bandwidth is not metered, so the app's egress costs nothing.

Railway figures from the worked example above, with the usage assumptions stated there. Out Plane prices from outplane.com/pricing, checked on November 12, 2026.

The Out Plane figures assume the app fits in op-20's 512 MB. The service in Railway's guide has brief memory spikes to 700 MB. An app like that needs op-34 (1 vCPU, 2 GB, $18 a month), which puts one app and PostgreSQL at $24 on Starter.

The trade-offs run both ways. A mostly idle app can cost less on Railway, because Railway bills only what the service uses, while Out Plane bills the instance as long as it runs. Railway also has 4 regions and vertical autoscaling. In return, Out Plane's bill does not change with egress, and the database is a managed PostgreSQL service you do not operate yourself. Out Plane apps run in Germany, with up to 1 instance per app on Starter, 5 on Pro and 10 on Growth.

See Out Plane pricing for every instance size, or our Railway alternatives guide for how Out Plane, Render, Fly.io and others compare beyond price.

Frequently asked questions

Does Railway charge when my app has no traffic?

Yes. Railway bills the memory and CPU a running service holds, whether or not it serves requests. Serverless mode can put an idle service to sleep, with a cold start on the next request.

Do unused Railway credits roll over?

No. The $5 on Hobby, the $20 on Pro and the $1 on the Free plan reset every billing cycle.

How much does a PostgreSQL database cost on Railway?

There is no fixed price. A PostgreSQL service is billed for its memory, CPU and volume like any other service. In the example above, a lightly used database comes to about $3.05 a month, and a high availability cluster multiplies that.

Can I set a spending cap on Railway?

Yes. A hard usage limit, $10 at minimum, stops all workloads when your usage reaches it. An email alert at a lower amount warns you first without stopping anything.