How does Railway pricing work?

Plans and included usage credits

Railway organizes its platform into four paid and free tiers alongside an introductory trial, documented on the Railway plans page:

• Trial: A 30-day trial with a one-time grant of $5 in credits. It requires no credit card at signup, but the $5 credit expires after 30 days. If you upgrade before it runs out, your remaining credit carries over. Trial users cannot buy extra credits without moving to Hobby.
• Free: $0 per month. Intended for running small apps, this tier provides $1 of free resource credit every month.
• Hobby: $5 per month. It includes $5 of monthly resource usage.
• Pro: $20 per month. It includes $20 of monthly resource usage.
• Enterprise: Custom monthly pricing for larger organizations needing custom resource boundaries and compliance agreements.

The subscription credit works on a simple offset system, but it is not a roll-over balance. Every billing cycle, your included usage resets to zero. If you do not use your allotment, the unused portion does not accumulate over time.

You always pay your subscription fee on paid tiers, regardless of how little you deploy. For instance, on the Hobby plan, if your containers consume $3 of resources in a month, your total bill is $5 because the subscription fee is fixed. If your resource usage reaches $7, your bill comes out to exactly $7, which represents the $5 subscription base plus the $2 in extra usage.

The same accounting applies to the Pro plan. If your Pro workloads generate $15 of resource usage, your monthly charge remains $20. If your usage hits $35, you pay $35, which is the $20 base plan fee plus the $15 difference.

Railway also waives the $5 monthly Hobby subscription fee automatically for a small set of active builders based on platform usage and GitHub activity. They do not accept manual waiver requests, so you cannot apply for it yourself.

Per-resource pricing rates

Standard services on Railway bill by the second according to the resources your containers actually provision and consume. You can track current platform rates directly on the Railway pricing page.

Memory and CPU

Compute costs for standard services break down into memory capacity and processing power:

• RAM: $10 per GB per month ($0.000231 per GB per minute, or $0.00000386 per GB per second).
• vCPU: $20 per vCPU per month ($0.000463 per vCPU per minute, or $0.00000772 per vCPU per second).

Because pricing is calculated down to the second, ephemeral jobs and background workers that shut down when idle do not rack up charges while stopped. That keeps costs low for bursty scripts.

Storage, builds, and networking

Persistent disks and outbound data transfer have their own line items:

• Volume Storage: $0.15 per GB per month ($0.000003472222222 per GB per minute, or $0.00000006 per GB per second).
• Network Egress: $0.05 per GB ($0.000000047683716 per KB) across standard services.
• Object Storage: $0.015 per GB-month, which includes free egress along with free Class A and Class B operations.
• Builds: Service builds are completely free. Railway does not charge you for build CPU, memory, base-image downloads, image exports, or image storage.

Free builds are a significant relief if you push code frequently throughout the day. You never have to budget for continuous integration compute overhead on Railway.

Sandboxes and VM pricing

If you run Railway Sandboxes or isolated VMs, the platform bills them at dedicated VM rates rather than standard container rates. Memory and CPU run at distinct rates:

• VM Memory: $0.00001929 per GB per second, which works out to about $50 per GB-month while running, or $0.001157 per GB per minute.
• VM CPU: $0.00001929 per vCPU per second, which is about $50 per vCPU-month, charged for active use only, or $0.001157 per vCPU per minute.
• VM Network Egress: $0.05 per GB, identical to container traffic.

VM usage draws directly from your plan's included resource credits, so you do not need a separate billing arrangement to spin up a sandbox environment.

Plan comparison and resource limits

Each tier enforces resource ceilings to protect the cluster and match workload scale.

Free plans include 1 GB of ephemeral disk alongside their 0.5 GB volume limit. Hobby plans cap ephemeral storage at 100 GB and build image sizes at 100 GB. Pro unlocks unlimited build image sizes, 100 GB ephemeral disk, and allows horizontal scaling across 42 replicas.

If your team requires enterprise add-ons, Railway unlocks them through monthly commitment tiers: HIPAA BAAs start at $1,000 per month, audit logs, RBAC, SSO, and log history start at $2,000, enterprise support with higher resource limits starts at $5,000, and dedicated VMs require a $10,000 monthly commitment.

A worked monthly billing example

To see how standard usage translates to a monthly invoice, consider a simple production stack on the Hobby plan running non-stop for a full 30-day month (720 hours).

Suppose you deploy a web service provisioned with 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM, paired with a small database service that uses 0.25 vCPU, 0.5 GB of RAM, and a 5 GB persistent volume. During the month, your application serves public traffic that generates 20 GB of network egress.

Here is the itemized cost breakdown:

1. Web App Compute:
2. CPU (0.5 vCPU at $20/month): $10.00
3. Memory (1 GB RAM at $10/month): $10.00
4. Database Compute and Storage:
5. CPU (0.25 vCPU at $20/month): $5.00
6. Memory (0.5 GB RAM at $10/month): $5.00
7. Volume (5 GB at $0.15/GB-month): $0.75
8. Bandwidth:
9. Egress (20 GB at $0.05/GB): $1.00

Your total raw resource usage comes out to $31.75 across the month.

Because this workload exceeds the Hobby plan's limits for single-service storage (5 GB maximum) or sits right at the edge, you might keep it on Hobby or move to Pro. If you keep this workload on the Hobby plan, your included usage credit covers the first $5. Your final invoice is the $5 subscription fee plus $26.75 in usage overage, totaling $31.75.

If you instead ran this workload on the Pro plan ($20/month), your included usage credit would absorb the first $20. Your final invoice would still be $31.75, calculated as the $20 base plan plus $11.75 in excess usage.

Billing cycles, early charges, and cancellations

Plan upgrades happen immediately. When you upgrade, your account gains access to higher resource allocations and new plan features right away. Downgrades, however, take effect at the start of your next billing cycle.

Railway charges your payment method post-paid. In some cases, Railway charges your card for a partial balance earlier in the billing cycle to confirm the card remains valid and to protect against fraud. If you need to update billing information, add a Tax ID, or view previous invoices, navigate to Account > Billing and click "Manage Subscription".

As of March 30th, Railway no longer allows new prepaid credit setups and requires a post-paid credit card for standard accounts (Enterprise customers can still pay by invoice). If an older account using prepaid credits hits a zero balance, Railway immediately cancels the subscription, stops all running workloads, and disables deployments until new credits are added.

Cancellation handling depends on your payment method:

• Credit card subscriptions: If you cancel a Hobby or Pro plan paid by card, the plan stays active until the end of your billing cycle. Any accrued usage is billed at the end of the period.
• Prepaid credit subscriptions: Canceling a Hobby subscription funded by prepaid credits terminates the plan immediately, and any remaining credit balance is permanently forfeited.

Data retention policies also differ by plan if you cancel or let an account lapse. Persistent volume data is kept for 30 days after expiration on Free or Trial tiers, 60 days on Hobby, and 90 days on Pro before permanent deletion. Rollback images are retained for 24 hours on Free/Trial, 72 hours on Hobby, 120 hours on Pro, and 360 hours on Enterprise.

Default agent spend limits are preset to $5 per month on Hobby, $20 per month on Pro, and custom limits on Enterprise.

Monitoring Railway spend with Costbrake

If you run multiple microservices or background queues, sudden traffic spikes or infinite loops can burn through your included credits quickly. You can read our guide on How do I set a hard usage limit on Railway? to cap costs in the dashboard.

For broader infrastructure tracking across multiple vendors, Costbrake monitors spend across 23 providers including Railway, AWS, and Cloudflare. It reads your Railway workspace usage every 5 minutes and flags sudden consumption jumps, budget thresholds, and month-end forecasts before an unexpected bill arrives.

If runaway jobs threaten your monthly budget, Costbrake provides manual, opt-in brakes on its Pro and Team tiers that can set the workspace hard limit to current usage (a minimum of $10) or stop a specific service. You can review plan details on the Costbrake pricing page or follow the agent setup documentation to connect your workspace token.