Railway Pricing & Free Plan Limits
Complete pricing breakdown for Railway including all plans, hidden costs, and limitations.
Pricing score: 45/100
Is Railway free?
Yes — the Trial plan costs nothing. Paid plans start at $5.00/month (Hobby).
Free plan limits
- Users: 1 user
- Storage: 1GB RAM limit
- 1GB RAM limit, Shared vCPU, Credits expire in 30 days, No guaranteed support
Watch out: Credits expire in 30 days, Must upgrade to Hobby to continue
Plans & Pricing
User limit: 1 user
Storage: 1GB RAM limit
User limit: 1 user
Storage: Usage-based
User limit: Per seat
Storage: Usage-based
User limit: Unlimited
Storage: Custom
Pricing Issues Reported by Users
Free tier removed, only $5 trial credits
Railway eliminated its free tier in August 2023 to combat abuse. New users only get $5 in trial credits that expire in 30 days. After that, you must pay at least $5/month on the Hobby plan. This surprised many developers who expected a permanent free tier like competitors offer.
Unpredictable usage-based billing
Railway charges per-second for CPU, memory, and egress. Users report difficulty predicting monthly costs, with one user seeing $51.79 monthly where $41 (79%) came from egress alone. A development database sitting idle can still cost ~$10/month in memory allocation.
Egress charges dominate bills for media apps
At $0.05/GB, egress (outbound data transfer) can quickly become the largest cost for applications serving images, videos, or large files. Users report egress costs exceeding their compute costs by 3-4x, making Railway expensive for content-heavy applications.