Is Railway Free in 2026? What the Free Plan and the Trial Credit Can Run

Railway is free for 30 days, with a one-time $5 credit and no card, and after that it stays free with $1 of usage a month on the Free plan. At Railway's per-second rates, read on its pricing page on October 26, 2026, that $1 buys about 36 hours of a fully busy vCPU or 72 GB-hours of memory, enough for a service that sleeps between requests and not enough for one that holds 0.5 GB all month.

That is the whole answer in one line, and the rest of this page is the arithmetic behind it, because Railway bills memory and CPU by the second, which makes the Free plan a budget rather than a fixed box, and what it runs depends on how long a service stays awake. Below: the trial, the Free plan after it, three small workloads priced against the credit, the limits that have nothing to do with money, and the point where the $5 Hobby plan is the honest answer.

Every figure comes from Railway's pricing page, its plans documentation and its free trial documentation. Hour and day figures are our arithmetic on the printed per-second rates.

Toolradar data: on Toolradar, the software directory we run, 140 of the 198 hosting and deployment tools it ranks have a free plan, 71% of them, out of 318 tracked as of October 26, 2026, and the median cheapest paid plan across the 61 that publish one is $20 a month, per the Toolradar hosting and deployment ranking. Railway's Hobby floor is a quarter of that median; its record is Railway on Toolradar.

What a dollar of Railway buys

Railway prices four meters by the second, and two of them decide the Free plan. CPU costs $0.00000772 per vCPU-second and memory $0.00000386 per GB-second, which the plans doc rounds to $20 per vCPU and $10 per GB for a full month. Volumes cost $0.00000006 per GB-second, about $0.15 per GB a month, and egress $0.05 per GB.

Divide the monthly credit by the rates and the Free plan's budget becomes concrete, by our arithmetic:

• A dollar of CPU is 129,534 vCPU-seconds, just under 36 vCPU-hours. A service that keeps one core busy around the clock spends it in a day and a half.
• A dollar of memory is 259,067 GB-seconds, about 72 GB-hours. A service that holds the Free plan's full 0.5 GB spends it in 6 days.
• A service that holds 100 MB all month spends exactly the credit on memory, 0.1 GB for 720 hours, leaving nothing for CPU or egress.

Memory is the meter that empties the credit, because an idle service still holds its memory while an idle service uses almost no CPU. Railway bills what a service draws, not its cap, so a process that holds 50 MB costs half of one that holds 100 MB, and that difference is the margin the Free plan lives on.

Three workloads priced against the credit

The scenarios assume a 30-day month and nothing else running in the project. They are our arithmetic on the printed rates, not vendor figures.

Serverless is what makes the first row work. With it enabled, Railway puts a service to sleep after about 5 minutes without outbound packets and wakes it on the next request, with a cold start, per its Serverless documentation. A slept service is not billed for memory, so a demo that gets visited a few times a day costs cents. Services with static outbound IPs can stay awake, and so does anything that polls, including NTP, which is the usual reason a "sleeping" bot keeps billing.

The third row is the honest limit. An always-on API that uses the Free plan's whole memory allowance costs $7 a month at a light load, more than the Hobby fee, so the Free plan cannot host it; on Hobby the same service fits inside the included usage only if it holds less memory. What the Free plan runs well is anything that sleeps, or anything small enough to hold tens of megabytes.

When the credit is gone, Railway stops the workloads rather than charging you. Its cost control documentation describes the same hard limit on paid plans: usage hits the limit, services go offline, and they redeploy automatically once the issue is resolved within 30 days.

What the trial gives that the Free plan takes away

The trial is a Hobby-shaped account with a five-dollar ceiling; the Free plan that follows it is a smaller box with a one-dollar ceiling. The pricing page's comparison table lists the step down:

Two of those rows matter more than the money. Cron jobs disappear after the trial, so a scheduled scraper or a nightly report needs Hobby no matter how little it costs to run. And custom domains go to zero, so a Free plan site lives on a railway.app address.

The trial also has two versions. Connecting a GitHub account that Railway can verify, based on its age and activity, gives the full trial; otherwise the limited trial restricts outbound network access and the open ports, per the free trial documentation. Verification is automated and Railway says it does not respond to requests for it. If you upgrade with trial credit left, the balance carries over, though it may be applied from the second billing cycle rather than the first.

Devshot is a free daily email for developers that flags changes to free tiers and pricing on platforms like Railway the week they happen. Join at devshot.co.

The free VM that needs no account

Railway added a route that skips signup entirely. Running ssh railway.new from a terminal gives a Linux VM with 2 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM, coding agents preinstalled and a preview URL, with no account and no card, per the free VM page and the trial docs. The limits are 60 minutes of build time, 3 boxes per IP address a day and 24 hours to claim the box by signing up, after which an unclaimed VM and its files are deleted. Compute on an unclaimed box is free; claim it and it moves into your account with the same files and URL, where normal plan limits apply. When a region is busy, Railway caps the number of anonymous VMs and asks you to retry or sign up.

It is a scratchpad for an agent or an afternoon, not hosting, so nothing on it should be the thing you point a domain at. For a static site that should stay up for free, the best free static hosting list covers platforms built for that; for a database, the best free database hosting list does the same.

When Hobby is the real floor

Hobby's fee is a minimum that includes the same amount of usage, so it is free only in the sense that the fee buys compute. Railway's plans FAQ answers "Is the hobby plan free?" with a flat no: you pay the fee even in a month with $3 of usage, and $7 of usage bills $7. What Hobby unlocks beyond the budget is the list above in reverse: 48 vCPU and 48 GB per service, 2 custom domains, cron jobs, 5 GB volumes, 7-day logs, 100 GB images and 40-minute builds, plus 3 project members.

Railway does waive the Hobby fee for what it calls a small set of active builders, assessed automatically on platform usage and GitHub account, with no way to apply. Prepaying is no longer possible; since March 30 a post-paid card is required, and the trial is the only stage without one.

Three other rules shape the free-to-paid decision. Included usage does not roll over, so a quiet month on Hobby banks nothing. Railway deletes a Free or trial account's volumes 30 days after the credit expires, against 60 days after a Hobby cancellation. And removed deployment images are kept 24 hours on Free against 72 on Hobby, which decides whether a rollback is a click or a rebuild.

The Railway pricing page prices Hobby against Pro for three app sizes; the Railway review covers the product. If the question is Railway's free tier against a competitor's, Railway vs Render and Railway vs Fly.io price the same small app on each, and cloud free tiers compared lines up the free allowances across platforms.

Who should stay on the Free plan

Stay free for a demo, a portfolio API, a Discord or Slack bot that holds little memory, or a staging copy that can sleep. Turn Serverless on, keep the process small, set the usage limit email alert, and the credit covers the month.

Move to Hobby the moment you need a cron job, a custom domain, a service that must stay awake with more than about 100 MB resident, or a second project. At that point the Hobby fee buys the full platform and the same amount back in compute, which is why Railway's own pricing FAQ tells new users to deploy on the trial or Hobby for a week and read the usage estimate before deciding.

If you are arriving from a platform that dropped its free tier, the Heroku migration guide covers the move, and the best hosting for indie hackers list widens the choice.

How we checked

We read Railway's pricing page, plans documentation, free trial documentation, pricing FAQ, Serverless documentation, cost control documentation and free VM page on October 26, 2026. Hour figures divide one dollar by the per-second rates on the pricing page; scenario costs multiply assumed memory and CPU draws, stated in each row, by those rates for a 30-day month. The Toolradar figures come from its live hosting and deployment ranking on the same day. Railway changes its limits often; check the pricing page before you plan around a number here.

Cite this: Devshot, "Is Railway Free in 2026? What the Free Plan and the Trial Credit Can Run", November 2026.

FAQ

Is Railway free?

Yes, in two stages. New accounts get a 30-day trial with a one-time credit and no card, and after it the Free plan continues at $0 with a dollar of usage a month that does not roll over. The Free plan caps each service at 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB of RAM and allows 1 project with 3 services.

What can Railway's Free plan actually run?

About 36 vCPU-hours or 72 GB-hours of memory a month, by our arithmetic on Railway's per-second rates. That covers a service that sleeps between requests, or an always-on process that holds well under 100 MB, and not an always-on service at the 0.5 GB cap, which costs about $5 a month in memory alone.

How long does the $5 trial credit last?

Up to 30 days, or until the credit is spent. Railway says how far it goes depends on what you deploy; a service holding the trial's full 1 GB of memory around the clock would spend $10 a month at the printed rate, so the credit lasts about 15 days on that service, by our arithmetic.

Does Railway's Free plan need a credit card?

No. The trial and the Free plan need no card, and the ssh railway.new VM needs no account at all. Hobby and Pro require a post-paid card; Railway stopped accepting prepayment on March 30.

Is the Hobby plan free?

No. Hobby's monthly fee includes the same amount of resource usage and is charged even if you use less, with usage above it billed on top. Railway waives the fee for a small set of active builders it selects automatically, with no application process.

What happens when the free credit runs out?

Railway stops your workloads instead of charging you, and redeploys them automatically if the issue is resolved within 30 days. Volumes on a Free or trial account are deleted 30 days after the credit expires unless you upgrade.

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