Railway alternatives for always-on apps without metered compute
Railway is a very good platform and its pricing is published plainly: Hobby is $5/mo with $5 of usage included, Pro is $20/mo per seat with $20 included, and then compute is metered per second at $0.00000772 per vCPU-second (about $20 per vCPU a month) and $0.00000386 per GB-second of memory (about $10 per GB a month), with egress at $0.05/GB and volumes at about $0.15 per GB a month. The bill is honest and it moves with usage. A pack here is the other model: you buy fixed CPU, RAM and disk at a flat price and the number on the invoice is the number on the pricing page.
Side by side
6 rows favour Hostwares, 1 favour Railway, 2 even
| Feature | HHostwares | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Plan fee | None; the pack is the whole price | Hobby $5/mo (includes $5 usage); Pro $20/seat/mo (includes $20 usage) |
| Compute | Fixed per pack: 1 vCPU / 4 GB / 25 GB on the Standard pack for $5/mo | Metered per second: about $20 per vCPU and $10 per GB of memory per month |
| Egress | Not metered | $0.05/GB |
| Persistent storage | The pack's disk | Volumes at about $0.15 per GB per month |
| Scale to zero | No; the pack is always on | Yes, serverless sleep is available |
| Team seats | No per-seat fee | $20 per member per month on Pro |
| Free tier | None; entry at $1/mo | One-time trial credit |
| Managed databases | Postgres, MySQL, Redis and more from $10/mo flat | Native databases, billed as metered compute and volume |
| AI operator | HW deploys, reads logs and fixes with your approval, over web, CLI and MCP | Not offered |
Railway facts read on 2026-11-06 from Railway pricing. Vendors change prices; confirm on their site. Hostwares prices are read from our pack table when this page is rendered.
When to stay with Railway
Stay on Railway if your workload is bursty and benefits from scale-to-zero, if you want many small services wired together with private networking and templates, or if you simply like the product; it is well built. Move when your services run all month anyway, so metering only adds variance, when egress has become a visible line, or when a per-seat fee is the biggest item on a small team's bill.
What it costs on Hostwares
Smallest site pack
$1/mo
Starter: 1 vCPU / 1 GB / 10 GB
Production site pack
$5/mo
Standard: 1 vCPU / 4 GB / 25 GB
Managed database
$10/mo
Postgres, MySQL and more, its own pack
Dedicated Supabase
$5/mo
Auth, storage and Postgres on one instance
- • A pack that matches Railway's compute for a service running all month costs the pack price and nothing else; use the calculator to put your own vCPU, memory and egress numbers in.
- • Flat for the pack's term. Bandwidth is not metered, there is no per-seat fee, and payment comes before the build starts.
Moving off Railway?
Point HW — our AI DevOps agent — at your repo and it migrates your Railway app for you: detects the framework, wires the database, sets env vars, and configures SSL. No manual reconfiguration.
- Managed Postgres, MySQL, Redis or bring your own — env vars injected automatically.
- One-click SSL, global CDN, and flat container pricing — no per-deploy credits.
- The AI does the migration — you review and go live.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Railway cost for an always-on app?
Add the plan fee to the metered compute: at the published rates, one vCPU is about $20 a month and each GB of memory about $10 a month, before egress at $0.05/GB. The plan's included usage offsets the first $5 or $20 of that.
What is the flat alternative?
A Hostwares pack: $1 / $5 / $10 / $25 per month for fixed CPU, RAM and disk, with egress not metered and no per-seat fee. Databases are separate packs from $10/mo.
What does Railway do that Hostwares does not?
Scale to zero, private networking between many services in one project, and a template marketplace. If you need those, stay.
Can I move a Railway project to Hostwares?
Yes. Connect the same GitHub repository, copy the environment variables, and the framework is detected and built. Dump the database with pg_dump and restore it into a database pack, then update the connection string.
Where do the Railway numbers come from?
From railway.com/pricing, read on the date shown under the table. Vendors change prices; confirm there before deciding.