Railway Pricing 2026: Free Tier Limits, Usage Costs & When to Upgrade

Railway's pricing trips up developers who assume it works like Vercel or Netlify with a generous free tier and predictable monthly bills. It doesn't — it's usage-based, and the bill can climb fast once you move past hobby projects. Here's what you're actually paying for in 2026. How Railway pricing actually works Railway bills on three axes: compute (vCPU-hours), memory (GB-hours), and egress (GB). There's no seat-based pricing and no per-project fee. Every service you spin up — a Next.js app, a Postgres instance, a Redis container, a background worker — accumulates compute and memory cost independently. This is the first gotcha: a monorepo with three separate Railway services isn't one bill line, it's three. A typical Next.js + Postgres + Redis stack is billing on all three simultaneously, 24/7, even if traffic is zero. Railway free tier limits in 2026 The Hobby plan starts at $5/month (a recent change from the old credit system) and includes a $5 usage credit each month. If your services stay within that credit, you pay only the base $5. Exceed it and Railway charges the overage at standard rates. Resource Hobby included Rate above included vCPU ~8 vCPU-hours/mo (within $5 credit) $0.000463 / vCPU-second Memory ~32 GB-hours/mo (within $5 credit) $0.0000018 / GB-second Egress 100 GB/mo $0.10 / GB Postgres storage 1 GB (Hobby DB) $0.25 / GB / mo Execution timeout 10 min (one-off jobs) — Team members 1 (solo) — The credit math is easy to exhaust. A single 512 MB Node.js service running continuously costs roughly 512 MB × 3600 s × 24 h × 30 d × $0.0000018/GB-s ≈ $2.40/month in memory alone. Add a small Postgres instance and a Redis container and you've eaten the credit. The $5 base is essentially the minimum floor, not a ceiling. The free trial (no credit card) gives $5 one-time credit and then stops. That's roughly enough for a weekend of testing — not a production staging environment. Pro plan: what changes The Pro plan costs $20/month per workspace and removes the