# Railway

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/hosting/railway/

Application platform that builds services from a repository or Dockerfile and bills plan fees that include usage credits.

## Who it suits

Teams that want a plan fee which doubles as usage credit, and deploy services straight from a Dockerfile without managing servers. The $5 Hobby fee comes back as $5 of resource usage.

Consider something else if You need to run in a region outside California, Virginia, Amsterdam or Singapore.

## iScore

70 / 100 (80% interval 64–75), rank 3 of 11 in hosting — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every hosting peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/hosting/railway/alternatives/

- Price: 75 (69–81), weight 25%, 4 of 5 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_card_required
- Capacity and limits: 48 (37–60), weight 20%, 3 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: bandwidth_included, concurrent_builds, entry_plan_memory
- Capabilities: 83 (73–93), weight 20%, 10 of 12 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: containers, streaming_response_limit
- Trust and compliance: 66 (60–72), weight 15%, 7 of 11 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: iso27001, pci_dss, private_networking, support_response_time
- Evidence: 98 (98–98), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 50 (11–89), weight 10%, 0 of 2 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans), read 2026-09-13)
- Kind of free offer: Free tier ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans), read 2026-09-13)
- What the free plan includes: A $0 plan alongside Hobby at $5 and Pro at $20. Deployment images on the free and trial tier are retained 24 hours, against 72 on Hobby. ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans), read 2026-09-13)
- Entry paid plan: $5 / month (Hobby) ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans), read 2026-09-13)
- Pricing model: A base subscription fee that goes towards usage, with the plan's own credit included; anything beyond the credit is billed as resource usage. ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans), read 2026-09-13)
- Egress over allowance: $0.05 / GB ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans), read 2026-09-13)
- When you exceed a cap: Billed automatically: on the Hobby plan ($5/month, includes $5 of resource usage) usage above the included amount is charged as a delta on top of the subscription — no throttling or suspension is documented ([source](https://docs.railway.com/pricing/plans), read 2026-09-05)

### Limits

- Storage (entry plan): 0.5 GB of volume storage on Free and up to 5 GB on Hobby ($5/month) — a ceiling, not an allocation, and volume storage is billed on usage rather than included. Recorded without a magnitude for the same reason as this record's memory figure: a cap you pay for is not comparable with an allowance you are given. ([source](https://railway.com/pricing), read 2026-09-14)
- Memory (entry plan): 48 GB on Hobby ($5/month) — but that is a ceiling, not an allocation. Railway's table states the figure is a maximum including replica multiplication, so it is 8 GB across each of up to 6 replicas, and memory is billed at $10 per GB per month on top of the $5 fee. Recorded without a magnitude because a cap you pay for is not comparable with an allowance you are given. ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans), read 2026-09-07)
- Sites or apps included: 50 projects and 50 services per project on Hobby; Pro raises both to 100 and Enterprise is unlimited. ([source](https://railway.com/pricing), read 2026-09-13)
- Monthly visits cap: No monthly visit or bandwidth cap is published. Rate limits are platform-wide: about 11,000 HTTP requests per second to a domain, and 10,000 concurrent connections. ([source](https://docs.railway.com/networking/public-networking/specs-and-limits), read 2026-09-13)
- Max request duration: 15 minutes while data keeps transferring; closed after 5 minutes with no data transferred. Websocket connections are exempt and can stay open indefinitely. ([source](https://docs.railway.com/networking/public-networking/specs-and-limits), read 2026-09-05)

### Execution

- Streaming response limit: Platform-wide: an HTTP request may run up to 15 minutes while data keeps transferring, and is closed after 5 minutes with none. Idle HTTP/1.1 connections close after 60 seconds between requests. WebSocket connections are exempt. Railway documents the connection's duration here, not how the response is delivered. ([source](https://docs.railway.com/networking/public-networking/specs-and-limits), read 2026-09-05)
- Managed connection pooling: Supported ([source](https://docs.railway.com/databases/postgresql-pgbouncer), read 2026-09-05)

### Deployment

- Git deployment: Supported ([source](https://docs.railway.com/deployments/github-autodeploys), read 2026-09-05)
- Docker deployment: Supported ([source](https://docs.railway.com/guides/dockerfiles), read 2026-09-05)
- Scheduled jobs: Supported ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/cron-jobs), read 2026-09-05)

### Infrastructure

- Persistent processes: Supported ([source](https://docs.railway.com/services), read 2026-09-13)
- Persistent storage: Supported ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/volumes), read 2026-09-05)
- Managed databases: Limited ([source](https://docs.railway.com/databases), read 2026-09-05)
- Edge network: Supported ([source](https://docs.railway.com/networking/edge-networking), read 2026-09-05)
- Scales to zero: Limited — Serverless sleeps an idle service, but a slept service still holds a slot and is de-prioritised. ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/app-sleeping), read 2026-09-13)
- Autoscaling: Limited ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/scaling), read 2026-09-05)
- Regions: 4 regions: California, Virginia, Amsterdam, Singapore ([source](https://docs.railway.com/reference/regions), read 2026-09-13)
- Uptime SLA: Published as availability targets rather than a contractual SLA: 99.9% on Hobby, 99.99% on Pro, 99.999% on Enterprise, which also adds support SLOs. ([source](https://railway.com/pricing), read 2026-09-14)

### Auth

- Audit logs: Audit Logging is listed under Product Security, and Data Access Logging under Access Control. Neither is described further and no retention period is given. ([source](https://trust.railway.com/), read 2026-09-14)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: Community support on Trial and on Hobby, the entry paid plan. Pro gets "Railway support"; Enterprise adds support SLOs. ([source](https://railway.com/pricing), read 2026-09-14)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3, both listed under Compliance, with SOC 2 and SOC 3 reports among the documents. The reports are gated rather than public: the Trust Center asks visitors to request access and frames the whole page as starting a security review. ([source](https://trust.railway.com/), read 2026-09-14)
- HIPAA: HIPAA is listed under Compliance and a HIPAA report is among the documents, behind the same access request as the rest. The Trust Center does not mention a business associate agreement. ([source](https://trust.railway.com/), read 2026-09-14)
- GDPR / data residency: GDPR is listed under Compliance, alongside the EU-US and Swiss-US Data Privacy Frameworks. No region is named and no residency commitment is made anywhere on the page — the listing is about the regime, not about where data sits. ([source](https://trust.railway.com/), read 2026-09-14)
- Encryption at rest: Encryption-at-rest is listed under Data Security, beside Data Backups and Data Erasure. The Trust Center names the feature and gives no algorithm, scope or key-management detail; disk encryption appears separately under Endpoint Security, which is about staff devices rather than customer data. ([source](https://trust.railway.com/), read 2026-09-14)

## Compared with

- [Railway vs Fly.io](https://inetgeek.com/compare/railway-vs-fly-io/)
- [Railway vs Render](https://inetgeek.com/compare/render-vs-railway/)
- [Railway vs DigitalOcean App Platform](https://inetgeek.com/compare/digitalocean-app-platform-vs-railway/)
- [Railway vs Heroku](https://inetgeek.com/compare/heroku-vs-railway/)
- [Railway vs Google Cloud Run](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-cloud-run-vs-railway/)