Dora NodaSign up for Railway today and you get a one-time grant of $5. Not $5 a month. $5, once, ever. That's the entire free allowance left on a platform that used to hand out $5 in recurring monthly credit to every account — until crypto miners and torrent-bot operators strip-mined the offer so hard that Railway killed it outright in July 2023. Three years later, the trial credit is still the only free thing on the platform, and search results, comparison sites, and "best free hosting" roundups still casually call it a "free tier" in 2026 headlines. It isn't one. It's worth asking the question none of those roundups answer precisely: how many actual days does $5 buy a real workload before the meter runs dry?
How the Recurring Free Tier Died
Before July 2023, Railway's Starter plan gave every account $5 in credit every month, indefinitely. It was a genuine free tier — the kind a hobbyist could run a small always-on project on forever, never touching a card. It didn't survive contact with scale. Railway's own migration notice described the abuse plainly: the always-free allotment had become a magnet for crypto miners and people spinning up bot-run file mirrors and torrent seedboxes, chewing through compute that Railway was giving away at zero revenue. The company's stated reasoning was blunt — it could no longer "keep up with bad actors taking advantage" of a perpetually free compute grant.
The fix Railway shipped wasn't a smaller recurring credit; it was the elimination of recurring credit entirely. Starter became Trial: a single, non-renewing $5 grant, available once per account. Developer became Hobby: $5/month, with that $5 now a subscription fee rather than a gift. Team became Pro: $20/month per seat. Weeks later, Railway added a per-GB egress charge on top, closing the other abuse vector (bots exfiltrating bandwidth for free). A card became mandatory to sign up at all, even for the free trial — the same anti-abuse logic that killed the recurring credit also closed the loophole of spinning up throwaway accounts to keep collecting it.
That history matters for reading the current pricing page correctly: the $5 trial isn't a marketing number chosen to look generous. It's what's left after three years of the platform progressively narrowing what it's willing to give away for nothing.
What $5 Actually Buys, Line by Line
Railway bills everything per second, from four separate meters: CPU, RAM, network egress, and volume storage. The published rates work out to clean monthly-equivalent numbers:
| Resource | Per-minute rate | Monthly equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | $0.000463 / vCPU / minute | $20 / vCPU / month |
| RAM | $0.000231 / GB / minute | $10 / GB / month |
| Network egress | ~$0.0000000477 / KB | $0.05 / GB |
| Volume storage | $0.0000034722 / GB / minute | $0.15 / GB / month |
Run those numbers against two workloads a new Railway account actually deploys — not a hypothetical "typical app," but the two shapes almost every side project takes:
Scenario A: a single lightweight web service, no database. A small Node/Express or Fastify API idling most of the time draws roughly 0.1 vCPU and 256 MB RAM on average, plus light egress — call it 0.3 GB/day for a low-traffic side project.
- CPU: 0.1 × $20 / 30 = $0.0667/day
- RAM: 0.25 × $10 / 30 = $0.0833/day
- Egress: 0.3 × $0.05 = $0.015/day
- Total: ~$0.165/day → $5 / $0.165 ≈ 30 days
Scenario B: the same web service plus a Postgres database — the shape almost every real project actually needs, and the one the trial credit is actually tested against:
- App (as above): $0.165/day
- DB CPU: 0.1 × $20 / 30 = $0.0667/day
- DB RAM: 0.25 × $10 / 30 = $0.0833/day
- DB volume (1 GB): 1 × $0.15 / 30 = $0.005/day
- Total: ~$0.323/day → $5 / $0.323 ≈ 15.5 days
That's the honest range: a bare single service can coast for close to a month on the trial grant; the moment a project adds the database almost every non-trivial app needs, the same $5 covers barely two weeks. Push the same shape to what an actually-launched (not just prototyped) project looks like:
Scenario C: a launched project — the Scenario B stack, but with real traffic: 3 GB/day of egress instead of 0.3 GB, and a second lightweight worker service (0.1 vCPU, 128 MB RAM) handling background jobs.
- Scenario B baseline: $0.323/day
- Extra egress (2.7 GB × $0.05): $0.135/day
- Worker CPU: 0.1 × $20 / 30 = $0.0667/day
- Worker RAM: 0.125 × $10 / 30 = $0.0417/day
- Total: ~$0.566/day → $5 / $0.566 ≈ 8.8 days
Three scenarios, three very different answers to "how long does the trial last" — 30 days, 15.5 days, or 8.8 days — depending entirely on whether the project is a bare prototype, a database-backed app, or something with real traffic. There's no version of "typical" that clears a month once a project has both a database and users. The trial credit isn't a monthly allowance in any of these; it's a one-time runway of one to four weeks, sized to how quickly the project it's meant to hook actually needs to grow.
The Clock Doesn't Reset — It Hands You a Bill
Railway's own docs are direct about what happens at $0: once the credit balance is exhausted, the account needs a card on file, and if there isn't one, "your subscription will be cancelled" and the deployed workloads stop. There's no grace period built around a recurring free allotment, because there isn't one anymore — the Trial plan is a single grant, not a tier.
The path forward from there is the Hobby plan: $5/month, which includes $5 of usage — structurally the same $5 the trial gave away for free, except now it's a subscription fee owed whether or not the workload uses it. Miss that distinction and it reads like nothing changed; in practice, the trial credit was a one-time gift, and Hobby is a $5/month floor plus metered overage on top, for as long as the project runs. Scenario B above, sustained past the trial window, lands around $0.32/day — roughly $9.70/month — meaning the $5 Hobby subscription doesn't even cover a database-backed app's actual draw; the overage bill starts almost immediately after the included credit burns down.
Same Workload, an Owned Box
Price the identical Scenario B workload — 0.2 vCPU combined, 512 MB combined RAM, 1 GB of Postgres storage, modest egress — against a Hetzner CX22: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB of included bandwidth, for roughly $4.59/month at 2026 pricing. That single box has 20× the CPU headroom, 8× the RAM, and 40× the disk the workload actually needs — with 20 TB of egress included, versus Railway metering every gigabyte at $0.05. Even Scenario C's launched-project traffic (3 GB/day, ~90 GB/month) is under half a percent of that included bandwidth.
| Railway (trial → Hobby) | Hetzner CX22 | |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1–15 (Scenario B) | Free (burning $5 trial credit) | $4.59/mo (flat, from day 1) |
| Days 1–9 (Scenario C, launched) | Free (burning $5 trial credit, faster) | $4.59/mo (unchanged) |
| Day 16+ (B) / Day 9+ (C) | $5/mo subscription + overage ≈ $9.70–$17/mo, depending on scenario | $4.59/mo (unchanged) |
| Month 3, 6, 12 | Same metered total, plus any future rate or plan changes | Still $4.59/mo |
| What changes the bill | Traffic growth, a second service, a bigger DB — each adds its own meter | Nothing, until the box itself is resized |
The Railway column isn't a static number — it's four separate meters that each move independently the moment the project grows even slightly. The Hetzner column is one number that Hetzner, not the workload's own growth, has to change. That's the entire distinction a "$5 trial credit" obscures: it's not that Railway is expensive per unit — the per-vCPU and per-GB rates are broadly in line with the rest of the metered-PaaS market — it's that a trial credit measured in days is being used to introduce a billing model that, unlike an owned box, has no ceiling of its own.
A Trial Credit Is a Preview of the Ratchet, Not an Exception to It
Railway's 2023 move — kill the recurring free tier, keep a one-time trial, require a card — is the same shape as Render's 2026 egress cuts and Fly.io's newly added billing lines: a platform's free or entry-level offer narrows on its own schedule, not the tenant's. The difference with Railway is how transparently the trial credit telegraphs the destination: $5 was never meant to run a project past its first couple of weeks. It's a demo window, priced to convert.
That's a reasonable business model for Railway to run. It's also exactly the trade a self-hosted platform is structurally immune to, because the bill isn't assembled from meters that move as a project grows — it's the fixed cost of hardware the team already owns.
Bex.co is the open-source, AI-native Render alternative — push a git repo, get a running HTTPS service on machines you own, whether that's a single Hetzner box like the one above or a fleet Cluster API manages for you. No trial credit, no burn-down clock, no per-second meter creeping upward as the project grows. Star the repo on GitHub or deploy your first app today.
Sources:
