A Railway alternative with a price you know in advance
Railway bills by usage: RAM, CPU and traffic per second. Its free plan is a $1 monthly credit, which at its listed rates is roughly ten days of a 256 MB bot, and the bill is not known until the month ends. Here the first bot is free and a 1 GB always-on tier is a flat $2 a month.
The worked example
A small bot idling at 256 MB with a sliver of CPU costs, at Railway's listed rates, in the region of $2.50 a month for the memory alone plus the CPU share, more when it is busy. The free plan's $1 credit runs out well before the month does. The one-time $5 trial for new accounts is exactly that: one time. The recurring free credit ended in August 2023.
Here the same bot is free on the 256 MB tier, and $2 a month buys 1 GB that never sleeps, with no per-second meter.
Railway's numbers come from its pricing pages in September 2026; check them before deciding, they change.
Moving from Railway
- The service already deploys from GitHub; connect the same repository here.
- Variables become environment variables in the panel.
- A Railway Postgres or Redis becomes a managed database here; dump and import.
- A web service gets a web address; a worker needs none.
When Railway fits better
Apps that need many services wired together with private networking, autoscaling, or the Railway templates library, and teams that want per-second billing across a fleet. A bot, a webhook receiver or a side project does not.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a usage meter here?
No. Tiers are flat: 256 MB free, 1 GB $2, 2 GB $3, 4 GB $6. Traffic on the free tier has a fair-use budget aimed at proxies, far above what a bot moves.
Can I run several services?
Yes, each as its own app on the account, all on one private network with the databases.
Do templates exist?
Discord, Telegram and WhatsApp bot templates, a server status page, a whitelist application form and a community website, all deployed in one click.
Is there a trial for paid tiers?
The free tier is permanent, and a 7-day trial of the game server product needs no card.