Railway Free Tier Guide 2026: What $1 Free Actually Covers

Railway sells fast deploys, but its “free” is smaller than most bootstrappers expect. This guide is based on Railway’s official pricing and documentation pages, not a hands-on test of the platform. The core point: Railway’s Free plan is not an always-free server. It is a $1 monthly usage credit wrapped around tight per-service limits. The one-time $5 trial lasts 30 days, and Hobby at $5 per month is the cheapest tier that can plausibly stay online.

The Free plan is a $1 credit, not a free server

The Free plan costs $0 per month and includes $1 of usage credit, which does not roll over, so it is a spending allowance rather than an always-free instance. Each service is capped at 1 replica and 0.5 GB RAM (Railway pricing).

Unused credit disappears at month-end. Every running service draws down the credit continuously, and when it reaches zero, the service stops.

Per-service limits on Free, from the Railway plans documentation:

• 1 replica per service
• 0.5 GB RAM
• 1 vCPU
• 1 GB ephemeral disk
• 0.5 GB volume
• 4 GB maximum image size

Account and project limits: 1 project, 3 services per project, 0 custom domains, 2 service domains, and 7-day log retention.

Sign-up needs no credit card. Usage beyond the credit does need one: per the Railway pricing FAQs, Railway only accepts credit cards for plan subscriptions.

What $1 of usage actually buys (the math)

Railway bills containers at usage prices, and service builds are free (Railway pricing):

• RAM: $10 per GB-month, about $0.0137 per GB-hour, so $1 buys about 73 GB-hours
• CPU: $20 per vCPU-month, about $0.0274 per vCPU-hour, so $1 buys about 36 vCPU-hours
• Egress: $0.05 per GB
• Volume storage: $0.15 per GB-month

Your live numbers are on the Railway usage page once a service runs. Sandboxes bill at higher VM rates, so check the sandboxes docs before using them on a credit budget.

Take one always-on service at 0.5 GB RAM and 1 vCPU. It costs $5 per month in RAM and $20 per month in CPU, or $25 per month before egress and volumes. At that full-CPU rate, $1 of Free credit lasts about 1.2 days.

If you count only the RAM component at $5 per month, the same $1 lasts about 6 days. Real duration depends on how much CPU the service actually uses. Treat the Free credit as a sandbox budget, not a hosting budget.

The $5 trial: better limits, 30-day fuse

The Trial is a one-time $5 credit valid for 30 days. After that, the account reverts to the Free plan (Railway free-trial documentation). During the trial, limits rise to 1 GB RAM per service, a shared vCPU capped at 2 vCPU, 5 services per project, and 2 replicas.

Trial accounts connect GitHub to get full network access, and the verification page explains how. The fair use policy governs what you can host. The credit is one-time. Once it is spent or expires, it cannot be renewed, stacked, or re-triggered. Exhausted trial credits are one of the conditions under which Railway stops services, so a trial project that burns $5 in two days goes dark on day three.

The trial suits one case: a focused 30-day build sprint that needs more headroom than Free and no subscription.

The $5 Hobby plan: the real minimum for always-on

Hobby costs $5 per month and includes $5 of usage. The $5 fee is charged even if you use nothing, and usage above $5 is billed on top (Railway pricing).

Apply that to the same example: an always-on 0.5 GB / 1 vCPU service uses $25 of usage per month. The included $5 covers only the RAM part, which leaves $20 of overage. The total bill is $5 fee plus $20 overage, or $25 per month. RAM-light, CPU-light workloads cost less, but a fully used service costs about $25 per month.

Per-service ceilings on Hobby are far higher than Free: 48 GB RAM, 48 vCPU, 6 replicas, 100 GB ephemeral disk, 5 GB volume, 2 custom domains, and 30-day log retention.

For context only, Pro costs $20 per month with $20 of included usage, 90-day log retention, 42 replicas, and up to 1 TB volume (Railway pricing).

Data retention and what happens when things stop

Railway stops services when usage limits are reached, trial credits are exhausted, a payment fails, or an invoice goes unpaid (Railway plans documentation). On Free and Trial, the first two are the ones that bite.

Image and volume retention differ by plan:

• Images after a deployment is removed: 24 hours on Free and Trial, 72 hours on Hobby, 120 hours on Pro.
• Volume data after expiry or cancellation: deleted 30 days after expiry on Free and Trial, 60 days after cancellation on Hobby, 90 days after cancellation on Pro.

Volumes are billed at $0.15 per GB-month while attached, so a forgotten 0.5 GB volume keeps drawing on your $1 credit. The volumes docs cover resizing and retention. On Free and Trial, export anything you need before the month ends.

The genuinely free option: ssh railway.new

Railway’s only no-account compute is ssh railway.new. It gives a VM with 2 vCPU and 2 GB RAM, a 60-minute build time, and a 24-hour claim window. You get 3 boxes per IP per day, and unclaimed boxes are deleted with their files (Railway free trial documentation). Details are on the free VM page.

No account and no card are needed. The VM is ephemeral by design, so it fits quick demos and “does this even boot?” checks, not anything that must outlive a session.

Where it stops being free (decision guide)

Use the cost-control guide to set usage limits before a service runs unattended. Free ends when the $1 credit runs out. The trial ends after 30 days or when the $5 is spent. Hobby’s included usage ends above $5 of usage. In practice, the free ceiling is roughly 1.2 to 6 days of always-on compute per month (Railway plans).

Match the tier to the workload:

• Throwaway experiments and demos: Free credit. Budget about $1 of runtime per month, and design so a sudden stop is not a disaster.
• A 30-day build sprint or evaluation: Trial. You get $5 and higher limits. Ship or shelve before day 30.
• Anything that must stay online (a bot, an API, a side project users reach): Hobby. Expect the $5 fee, and expect overage once a service runs at full utilization.
• Mission-critical production: outside this guide’s scope. Pro at $20 per month is the next step up.

Railway vs. the StacksFree question

StacksFree is about running software without paying. Railway’s Free plan and Trial fit that goal only for short workloads. The $1 monthly credit covers a few days of always-on compute, and Hobby at $5 per month is the cheapest tier that runs continuously (Railway pricing).

The Free credit is a demo budget and the Trial is a 30-day clock. Neither supports running a service for $0 indefinitely. If your constraint is truly zero dollars, ssh railway.new is the only option, and it works only because nothing persists.

Free vs. Trial vs. Hobby at a glance

The table compares the three tiers using the limits stated in Railway’s pricing and documentation pages.

	Free	Trial	Hobby
Monthly price	$0	One-time $5 credit	$5/month, charged even if unused
Usage credit	$1/month, does not roll over	One-time $5, 30-day validity	$5 included; overage billed
RAM per service	0.5 GB	1 GB	48 GB
vCPU per service	1	Shared, max 2	48
Replicas per service	1	2	6
Services per project	3	5	50
Custom domains	0	1	2
Service domains	2	2	4
Log retention	7 days	7 days	30 days
Volume	0.5 GB	0.5 GB	5 GB
Image retention after removal	24 h	24 h	72 h

Sources for the table: Railway pricing, the plans documentation, and the free-trial documentation.

The Bottom Line

Railway’s Free plan is a $1 monthly credit, not always-on hosting. The Trial is a one-time 30-day boost. Hobby at $5 per month is the real minimum for anything that must stay online, and a fully used always-on service costs about $25 per month (Railway pricing).

Use Free to learn, Trial to sprint, Hobby to host, and ssh railway.new for zero-dollar compute that disappears on schedule.

FAQ

How long does $1 of Free credit last?

$1 of Free credit covers about 73 GB-hours of RAM or 36 vCPU-hours of CPU. For an always-on 0.5 GB / 1 vCPU service, that is about 1.2 days at full CPU, or about 6 days if you count only the $5-per-month RAM component. Actual duration depends on CPU use (Railway pricing).

Can I renew or stack the Trial credit?

No. The Trial is a one-time $5 credit valid for 30 days. Once the credit is spent or expires, the account reverts to the Free plan, and it cannot be renewed, stacked, or re-triggered (Railway free-trial documentation).

Does the Free plan include a custom domain?

No. Free accounts get 0 custom domains and 2 service domains per service, plus 7-day log retention. Custom domains need the Hobby plan at $5 per month, which allows 2 custom domains (Railway pricing). Plan changes and invoices live on the billing page.

How This Guide Was Built

This guide is based on Railway’s official pricing and documentation pages, not a hands-on test of the platform. All figures were fetched on 2026-10-12 from the pages below. No numbers come from community sources or third-party benchmarks.

Sources: Railway pricing page (https://railway.com/pricing); Railway plans documentation (https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans); Railway free-trial documentation (https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/free-trial); Railway pricing FAQs (https://docs.railway.com/pricing/faqs).