App hosting and PaaS

Render vs Railway

Render charges fixed prices per instance on top of a flat workspace plan and runs managed Postgres; Railway meters CPU, memory and disk per second and leaves its database templates for you to run.

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The short answer

Render bills in three layers: a workspace plan (Hobby free, Pro $25, Scale $499 a month), a fixed price per instance (Starter $7 for 512 MB, Standard $25 for 2 GB) and metered extras such as bandwidth at $0.15/GB after 5 GB on Hobby or 25 GB on Pro. Railway bills usage per second, at $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB-month of memory, with egress at $0.05/GB; its $5 Hobby and $20 Pro fees count toward that usage.

The bigger difference is the database. Render’s Postgres is managed, from $6 a month, with point-in-time recovery on paid plans. Railway’s Postgres, MySQL, Redis and MongoDB are templates, and its docs say you are responsible for backups, tuning and maintenance outside Enterprise.

Both free tiers are for trying things: Render’s free web services sleep after 15 minutes idle and free Postgres expires after 30 days, while Railway Free gives $1 of usage a month and no custom domains. Render has five regions, Railway four.

Choose Render if

You want a managed Postgres with backups rather than a database you maintain
You want a fixed, predictable monthly price per instance
You are leaving Heroku and want web services, workers and cron jobs in the same model

Choose Railway if

Your services sit idle much of the time and you want to pay only while they run
Your app fits within the $5 of usage included in the Hobby plan
You want to move a service between regions later without changing domains

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Side by side

	Render	Railway
Stages	HobbyIndieStartupScale-upEnterprise	HobbyIndieStartupScale-upEnterprise
What it is	Managed PaaS	Usage-billed PaaS
From	Starter instance from $7/mo	Hobby $5/mo including $5 usage
Free tier	Hobby workspace: free static sites, free web services (512 MB, 0.1 CPU) that spin down after 15 minutes idle within 750 instance hours a month, one free Postgres (1 GB, expires after 30 days) and one free 25 MB Key Value; 5 GB bandwidth, 25 services max.	Free plan: $1 of usage credit per month, 1 project, 3 services, up to 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB per service, no custom domains, 3-day logs. New accounts also get a one-time $5 trial credit for 30 days.
Runs	Node, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, Elixir, any Docker image	Any language via builders or Dockerfile
Free tier sleeps?	Free web services sleep after 15 min; paid never	Optional Serverless mode sleeps idle services
Managed DBs	Postgres, Key Value (Redis-compatible)	Postgres, Postgres HA, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB templates
Regions	5: Oregon, Ohio, Virginia, Frankfurt, Singapore	4: California, Virginia, Amsterdam, Singapore
Open source	No	No
Self-hostable	No	No
EU data residency	Available	Available
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA	SOC 2, HIPAA
Checked	28 Sept 2026	28 Sept 2026
Strengths	Fixed instance prices make monthly compute cost easy to predict. Workers, cron jobs, databases and web services on one private network. Flat workspace pricing with unlimited members from $25/mo. Frankfurt region for EU data residency.	Pay only for resources actually used, metered per second. Very fast path from repository to running service with databases alongside. Pro fee is per workspace with unlimited seats. Services can change region without downtime (unless they have a volume).
Limitations	Free web services sleep after 15 minutes idle and take about a minute to wake. Free Postgres databases expire after 30 days and have no backups. Only 5 GB of bandwidth is included on Hobby and 25 GB on Pro; more costs $0.15/GB. A service's region cannot be changed after creation, and private networks do not span regions.	Database templates are unmanaged: you handle backups, tuning and maintenance outside Enterprise. The Hobby fee is charged even when usage is below $5. The Free plan allows no custom domains and only 0.5 GB of memory per service. Usage-based bills vary with traffic; set usage limits to avoid surprises.

Sources: Render pricing, Railway pricing. Full plans on each tool's page.

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Plans

Render

Hobby workspace 1 member, 25 services, 5 GB bandwidth, 2 custom domains	$0/mo + compute
Pro workspace Unlimited members, 25 GB bandwidth, autoscaling, full-stack previews, SOC 2/ISO reports	$25/mo + compute
Scale workspace 1 TB bandwidth, SAML SSO, SCIM, HIPAA workspaces	$499/mo + compute
Enterprise Uptime SLAs, technical account manager	Custom
Starter instance 512 MB RAM, 0.5 CPU	$7/mo
Standard instance 2 GB RAM, 1 CPU	$25/mo
Postgres Basic-256mb 0.1 CPU, 256 MB, storage $0.30/GB	$6/mo

Railway

Free $1/month usage credit, 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB per service	$0/mo
Hobby Includes $5 usage; 48 vCPU / 48 GB per service, 5 GB volumes, 7-day logs	$5/mo
Pro Per workspace, includes $20 usage, unlimited seats, 30-day logs, 1 TB volumes	$20/mo
Enterprise 99.99% SLA, SSO, HIPAA BAA, dedicated VMs	Custom

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