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Railway vs Render

What the same app costs on each, how they bill, and where each one gets expensive.

prices checked 29 September 2026 · USD, without VAT

Monthly cost in 4 sample setups

SetupRailwayRender
Hobby API1 × 0.5 vCPU / 512 MB, 20 GB egress, 10 % load$7$9.25
App with Postgres1 × 1 vCPU / 1 GB, Postgres 1 GB RAM, 5 GB, 100 GB egress, 25 % load$32.75$59.45
Small SaaS2 × 2 vCPU / 4 GB, Postgres 4 GB RAM, 50 GB, 500 GB egress, 25 % load$177.50$313.95
Staging, 8 hours a day1 × 0.5 vCPU / 512 MB, Postgres 1 GB RAM, 5 GB, 10 GB egress, 8 h a day, 10 % load$15.25$27.95

Of our 4 sample setups, Railway is cheaper in 4, Render in 0. Click a setup to open it in the calculator and change the numbers.

In short

Railway bills what your app actually uses, so a small or mostly idle app is cheap, and bandwidth costs $0.05 per GB from the first gigabyte. Render sells fixed instances, which keeps the bill predictable, but its Hobby workspace includes only 5 GB of bandwidth and charges $0.15 per GB after that, so traffic-heavy apps pay more there. Render has a free tier that sleeps; Railway has a small free plan and services that sleep when idle.

Railway

  • Usage-based: $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB-month of memory actually used, billed per second.
  • Hobby costs $5 a month and includes $5 of usage; Pro costs $20 and includes $20.
  • A free plan gives $1 of usage a month, capped at 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB of memory per service.
  • Idle services can sleep and cost nothing while asleep; the next request wakes them.
  • Egress $0.05 per GB from the first gigabyte; volumes $0.15 per GB-month, up to 5 GB on Hobby.
  • Postgres runs as an ordinary service at the same rates. Replicas can't use volumes.

Render

  • Fixed monthly instances from $7 (0.5 CPU, 512 MB) to $175 (4 CPU, 8 GB), billed by the second.
  • Free instances sleep after 15 minutes idle; a workspace gets 750 free instance hours a month.
  • Hobby workspace (one seat): 5 GB of bandwidth, then $0.15 per GB. Pro: $25 a month with 25 GB.
  • Postgres from $6 (256 MB) or $19 (1 GB) plus $0.30 per GB of storage; free Postgres expires after 30 days.
  • Disks $0.25 per GB-month; a service with a disk can't scale to several instances.

More comparisons

Sources

Prices were read from these pages on 29 September 2026.