Railway Hobby vs Pro in 2026: $5, $20 and no per-seat charge

Railway sells two plans to individuals and small teams, and the surprising part in 2026 is that neither is priced per head. Hobby is a $5 monthly minimum that comes with $5 of usage credits; Pro is a $20 monthly minimum that comes with $20 of credits and unlimited workspace seats. The money is therefore almost identical for a one-person project, and the real choice is about limits: how large a single service can get, how much disk it can hold, and how far back the logs reach. Both figures below were read from Railway's pricing page on 2026-10-25.

Hobby versus Pro

The free tier is a trial, not a plan: 30 days with $5 of credits, then $1 a month for 1 project, 3 services and 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB per service. Everything that looks like a real deployment starts at Hobby.

What the $20 actually means

There is no per-seat price to look up. Pro's line reads "unlimited workspace seats included", which means the bill is dominated by resource usage rather than headcount, and a five-developer workspace pays the same $20 floor as a solo developer. That is $4 per seat at five people and $20 per seat at one, so the plan gets cheaper per person precisely as the team grows.

Because the minimum is a credit rather than a fee, the two plans converge whenever usage is real. A service that burns $21.80 of resources costs $21.80 on Hobby and $21.80 on Pro — the $5 versus $20 difference only exists for accounts whose usage sits below $20, which is to say accounts that are barely running anything. The upgrade argument is limits and support, not price.

The limits are genuinely wide on both sides. Forty-eight vCPU on a Hobby service is beyond what most production apps will ever request, so the practical Pro triggers are storage past 5 GB and log history past 7 days. Those two lines are where a growing project actually feels the plan.

How we measured it

The plan table, the resources-and-limits table and the usage-rate table were fetched on 2026-10-25 from railway.com/pricing, with the plans reference page in Railway's docs used to confirm that a base subscription price is credited against usage. No service was deployed and no invoice was generated; per-second rates were multiplied by 2,592,000 seconds, the length of a 30-day month, and those conversions are labelled as calculated.

What changes in practice

The billing switch at the minimum is the trap. On Hobby, once usage passes $5 you are charged the total usage, not the usage plus $5, so the mental model of "plan fee plus metered usage" is wrong by exactly the plan fee. A month at $21.80 bills $21.80, and a month at $8 bills $8 — the floor only applies when usage is lower than the floor.

Memory is the line that surprises people, because it bills whether or not the service is busy. At $0.00000386 per GB-second, holding 1 GB costs about $10.01 a month even at zero traffic, so a forgotten staging environment is a real invoice. Railway does not charge for a service that is not running, which makes deleting idle environments the single largest cost control available.

Storage is the other Pro trigger. Five gigabytes of volume space is plenty for a small database and nowhere near enough for user uploads or a media cache; the Hobby ceiling arrives before the compute ceiling does. And since object storage bills at $0.015 per GB-month with free egress, moving files out of a volume and into a bucket is usually cheaper than upgrading.

Bottom line

Pick Hobby at $5 for anything with one developer and under 5 GB of data, and move to Pro at $20 when you need a second person, 30-day logs or more than 5 GB of volume. Because usage above the minimum is charged identically on both plans, the $15 difference is really a limits fee, and it buys 195 times the storage allowance (calculated 2026-10-25).