> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://efreedirectory.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Railway Has a Free Plan. It Is $1 a Month. - URL: https://efreedirectory.com/railway-free-plan-limits/ - Published: 2026-10-20T05:11:10.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T06:57:15.000Z - Description: The trial is a one-time $5 credit for 30 days. What replaces it is a permanent free plan with $1 a month, which covers a very small service and nothing more. - Author: Alpesh Gevariya - Tags: tool, Developer & Code **Railway keeps a permanent free plan, and it is smaller than the trial suggests. New accounts get a one-time $5 credit for 30 days, then revert to Free: $1 of credit a month that does not roll over, 512MB RAM, one vCPU, one replica. Hobby is $5 a month including $5 of usage, and that fee is a floor.**[1](#sources) Search for Railway's free tier and you will find articles claiming it does not exist. They are describing the trial, which does end, and missing the plan that follows it. Both exist, and they are different enough that judging Railway by the trial gives you the wrong picture in both directions. The trial is generous for a month. The free plan is tiny forever.[2](#sources) ## What the free plan actually includes | | Trial | Free | Hobby | | -------------------- | ---------------------- | ------------------ | ------------------------ | | Price | $0, one time | $0 | $5/mo including $5 usage | | Credit | $5, expires in 30 days | $1/mo, no rollover | $5/mo usage included | | RAM | 1GB | 0.5GB | Metered, $10/GB-mo | | CPU | Shared vCPU | 1 vCPU | Metered, $20/vCPU-mo | | Services per project | 5 | 1 replica | Unlimited | | Egress | Included in credit | Included in credit | $0.05/GB | | Custom domains | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Sleep on idle | No | No | No | The $1 credit is the whole allowance. Railway bills usage against it at metered rates, so $1 buys roughly 0.05 vCPU-months or 0.1GB of RAM for a month, and a running service consumes both. ## What $1 a month actually runs Not much, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. A service that idles at 512MB of RAM costs $5 a month at the RAM rate alone, five times the free credit. What fits is a small service that sleeps most of the time, a cron job, a webhook receiver, or a staging environment you spin up and tear down. Anything with a process that must stay resident will exhaust the credit in days. The credit does not roll over, so unused allowance is lost at the end of each month. Efficient use means turning services off rather than leaving them deployed and idle. ## The trial is the good part, and it is one-time Thirty days, $5 of credit, 1GB of RAM, shared CPU and up to five services in a project. That is enough to evaluate a real deployment, including a database and a background worker. It is one per account, not per project, and it does not renew. When it expires the account drops to the free plan rather than being suspended, which is gentler than most trials and means a hobby project can keep limping along afterwards. ## Hobby at $5 is a floor, not a cap This is the detail that surprises people. Hobby costs $5 a month and includes $5 of usage. If your services consume $12 of resources, you pay $12. The fee is not a subscription that covers a bundle. It is a minimum monthly spend, and the metered rates on top are the real price list: $20 per vCPU-month, $10 per GB of RAM-month, $0.05 per GB of egress and $0.15 per GB-month for volumes. For a small app that idles at 256MB and a fraction of a core, that lands around $6 to $8 a month. For anything heavier it climbs quickly. ## When the free plan is enough A webhook endpoint that handles a few hundred calls a month. A scheduled job that runs daily and exits. A demo environment that only needs to exist while someone is looking at it. It is also enough to learn the platform, provided you accept that the first month will feel much more capable than the second. If what you actually need is a database rather than a running process, [Supabase's free plan](https://efreedirectory.com/supabase-free-plan-limits/) gives 500MB and two projects without a credit balance to manage. ## When it stops being enough The first always-on service. That is the threshold, and it arrives as a surprise because the trial made everything look permanently on. For a project in that shape, the honest comparison is not another PaaS trial but a platform whose free tier does not expire, which is what [Vercel's Hobby plan](https://efreedirectory.com/vercel-free-plan-limits/) offers, with the trade being its non-commercial licence rather than a credit balance. ## Frequently asked questions **Does Railway have a free tier?** Yes. A permanent free plan with $1 of usage credit a month, 512MB RAM and one replica, separate from the one-time 30-day trial. **What happens when the Railway trial ends?** The account reverts to the free plan. It is not suspended and no card is charged unless you add one. **Does the $1 credit roll over?** No. Unused credit is lost at the end of each month. **Is Hobby $5 a month all in?** No. $5 is the minimum monthly spend and includes $5 of usage. Consumption beyond that is billed at metered rates. **Can I run a database on the free plan?** Technically yes, within the $1 credit and 512MB of RAM. A persistent database will not fit comfortably; volume storage alone is billed separately on paid plans. *Plan contents, credit amounts and metered rates verified against Railway's pricing and free-trial documentation on 20 October 2026.* ## Sources 1. Railway pricing: [railway.com/pricing](https://railway.com/pricing?ref=efreedirectory.com). Used for: One-time trial credit, the permanent free plan and metered rates. 2. Railway docs: plans: [docs.railway.com/pricing/plans](https://docs.railway.com/pricing/plans?ref=efreedirectory.com). *All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026\. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.*