Railway
Heroku-style git-push with the best modern UX in the category.
Railway is the cleanest answer to "Heroku is dead, what now." A canvas-style UI lets you wire up app + Postgres + Redis + worker visually, then it deploys via git push. Usage-based billing means a sleeping side project costs ~$1/month after the included $5.
For early-stage indie SaaS, Railway is roughly 2–3× the cost of running the same stack on Hetzner, but the time saved on ops makes the math work for many. Once you have real traffic and the bill crosses $50–100/month, the migration to a self-managed VPS starts to pay back.
Pros & cons
- + Best-in-class developer experience for git-push deploys
- + Add a Postgres / Redis / Mongo from the canvas with one click
- + Usage-based billing so idle services cost cents, not dollars
- + Templates for hundreds of common stacks
- − No always-free plan (since August 2023) — minimum $5/month
- − Single region per project; multi-region requires manual fan-out
- − Pricing scales fast for high-traffic apps — quickly more expensive than a tuned VPS
- − Smaller ecosystem than Heroku's peak
Plans & pricing
| Plan | Price | CPU | RAM | Disk | Bandwidth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby $5 includes $5 of usage | $5/mo | shared (8 vCPU bursts) | 8 GB | 5 GB | 100 GB |
| Pro per seat; usage on top | $20/mo | shared (32 vCPU bursts) | 24 GB | 50 GB | 100 GB |
Features at a glance
Railway head-to-head
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