Railway usage billing in 2026: $10.01 per GB-month and $20.01 per vCPU-month

Railway does not sell servers, it sells seconds. Memory is metered per GB-second, CPU per vCPU-second, storage per GB-second and traffic per gigabyte, which means the only way to predict a bill is to convert those rates into monthly figures and then guess how busy the app will be. The conversions are simple: about $10.01 per GB of RAM, $20.01 per vCPU, $0.16 per GB of disk and $0.05 per GB of egress. A service holding 1 GB, using half a vCPU, sending 20 GB and keeping 5 GB of disk lands at about $21.80 for the month.

The four meters

The monthly column assumes 2,592,000 seconds, which is 30 days exactly. A 31-day month is 2,678,400 seconds and produces a bill about 3.3 percent higher for the same usage, so annual budgeting should use the longer number.

Working the $21.80 example

Take a Node service that holds 1 GB of RAM, averages half a vCPU, sends 20 GB to the internet and keeps 5 GB of volume. Memory is 1 times $10.01, CPU is 0.5 times $20.01, egress is 20 times $0.05 and storage is 5 times $0.16. That is $10.01 plus $10.01 plus $1.00 plus $0.78, or $21.80.

Notice which line dominates: memory and CPU together are $20.02 of the $21.80, and egress is a dollar. Railway is a compute-priced platform, and bandwidth is almost decorative next to it. A team that optimises image sizes before it right-sizes memory is optimising the wrong line by a factor of twenty.

The same arithmetic explains why the plan minimum rarely matters for real apps. $5 of credit on Hobby covers 512 MB of memory for a month and nothing else, so anything with a second service or a database crosses the minimum immediately and is billed on usage instead of on the plan.

How we measured it

Railway's pricing page was fetched on 2026-10-25 and every per-second rate was multiplied by 2,592,000 to produce the monthly figures shown above. The plans reference page in Railway's docs was used to confirm that the base subscription is a credit against usage rather than a fee on top of it. No service was deployed, no sandbox was run and no invoice was inspected, so the worked example is arithmetic on published rates plus stated assumptions about CPU and traffic.

What changes in practice

The billing switch above the minimum is the single most misunderstood part. Railway charges total usage once usage exceeds the plan minimum, so the bill is not plan fee plus usage. A month at $21.80 of usage bills $21.80 on Hobby, which means the $5 minimum is a floor and never a fixed cost — and it also means upgrading to Pro at $20 does not reduce a heavy bill, it only raises the floor.

Memory bills whether or not traffic arrives, and that is the cost that grows silently. Three forgotten preview environments at 1 GB each are $30.03 a month, more than the plan itself. Railway does not charge for a service that is stopped, so deleting environments is the cheapest optimisation available, ahead of any code change.

Sandboxes have their own, much higher, rates: $0.00001929 per GB-second is roughly $50 per GB-month, five times a service. They bill only while running and an idle timeout destroys them, but a sandbox waiting on a model for an hour still costs real money, and it draws from the same included credit as everything else.

Bottom line

Budget $10.01 per GB of RAM and $20.01 per vCPU per month, add $0.05 per GB of egress, and expect the plan minimum to be irrelevant once more than one service exists. A realistic two-service app with 1 GB total and half as much CPU averages about $25 to $30 a month, which is still below the $45 a month a comparable managed instance costs elsewhere (calculated 2026-10-25).