Railway

Railway is a modern platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that makes deploying web applications, APIs, databases, and background workers simple and fast. It prioritises developer experience with minimal configuration required.

Features

Deployments

• Deploy from a GitHub repo with automatic builds on every push
• Dockerfile support for custom build environments
• Zero-config deployments for Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Java, and .NET
• Instant rollbacks to any previous deployment

Services & Databases

• One-click provisioned databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB
• Private networking between services within a project
• Environment variable management with secret injection
• Persistent volumes for stateful workloads

Developer Experience

• Live deployment logs in the dashboard
• Railway CLI for local development and deployments
• PR-based preview environments
• Usage-based pricing with a generous free allowance

Networking

• Automatic HTTPS for all public services
• Custom domain support
• Internal DNS for service-to-service communication

Quick Start

# Install Railway CLI
npm install -g @railway/cli

# Login and initialise
railway login
railway init

# Deploy the current directory
railway up

Pricing

• Hobby Plan: $5/month usage credit — ideal for side projects and small apps
• Pro Plan: $20/month with higher resource limits and team features
• Usage-based billing on top of the base plan

Railway is popular with indie developers and small teams for its simplicity compared to AWS/Azure, while still offering enough power for production SaaS workloads.