Today we’re announcing changes to Railway’s plans and pricing. The new plans will become available on July 3, 2023 and the migration will conclude on August 1, 2023.

We’re making these changes to provide better service and support to production users and teams.

Let’s take a look at what’s changing:

• We’re revamping the Trial experience for developers getting started with Railway. Beginning July 3, new sign-ups will receive $5 in nonrecurring credits towards usage
• The current Starter plan will be sunset effective August 1, which means there will no longer be recurring $5 monthly credits for Starter plan users

• We’re introducing a Hobby plan for developers to build and run personal projects. There will be a $5 monthly subscription fee which includes $5 of usage, with additional usage billed at Railway’s standard rates
• For a small set of active builders on the platform, Railway will waive the monthly subscription fee
• The current Developer plan will be sunset effective August 1

• We’re renaming Railway’s Team plan to Pro because even if you’re on your own, you may need production-grade infrastructure, features, and support
• The plan stays the same price ($20 / user / mo) and we’ll continue to pack the Pro plan with features that make it easy to build projects and companies on top of Railway

• Many of our users have been longing to get the full Railway experience without attaching a credit card for recurring billing. Starting July 3, developers will be able purchase the Hobby Plan using pre-paid credits

• From August 1 2023, we will start billing $0.10 / GB for any network egress on the platform. We will not charge for any ingress

• We will continue to charge at the following rates:
• RAM: $10 / GB per month. Billed by the minute
• CPU: $20 / GB per month

Here’s a sneak peek at our new plans and pricing:

New plans include Trial, Hobby, and Pro

Keep reading to learn why we’re making these changes and how they’ll impact you.

To read more about why we’re making these changes, check out Introducing the $5 Plan.

Since we last updated plans and pricing in May 2022, we’ve added more than 300,000 users and thousands of companies of varying sizes. We’re breaking new records every month for new users, deployments, projects and so on.

Although our team doubled in size from 7 to 14 over the same time period, we’ve spent an outsized amount of time and effort fighting fraud and dealing with service disruptions due to abuse.

Over the past year we’ve implemented a number of tightening measures (1, 2) to curb abuse. These adjustments were helpful but did not address the underlying issue of incentive misalignment.

By introducing charges for certain dimensions of usage, we’re intending to disincentivize some bad behavior like hosting mirror bots and copyrighted content, while reducing the fraud load we deal with in support.

This will elevate the level of service and support we can provide to legitimate users like you.

All this to say — we’re betting that $5 in free credits as a one-time thing is enough to help you see how powerful Railway is.

Starter, Developer, and Team plan users will have distinct migration paths

Good question! This depends on your current plan and whether or not you’re verified.

If you sign up for Railway on or after July 3, 2023 and are verified, here’s what will happen:

• You will enter the Trial plan with a one-time grant of $5 in free credits
• After this you will need to upgrade to Hobby or Pro to continue using Railway

If you sign up for Railway on or after July 3, 2023 and are not verified, here’s what will happen:

• You will enter the Limited Trial plan with a one-time grant of $5 in free credits which may only be used for databases and plugins

If you’re on Starter and verified, here’s what will happen on August 1, 2023:

• You will be eligible to upgrade to Hobby plan with the fee waived

If you’re on Starter and not verified, here’s what will happen on August 1, 2023:

• You will be downgraded to No Subscription

If you’re on Developer and verified, here’s what will happen on August 1, 2023:

• You will be automatically moved to the Hobby plan with the fee waived

If you’re on Developer and not verified, here’s what will happen on August 1, 2023:

• You will be downgraded to No Subscription

If you’re running a Team or are a member of a Team on Railway, no action is required. Here’s what will happen on August 1, 2023:

• Your Team plan will be updated to Pro
• You will start incurring charges for network egress at $0.10 per GB, and you will be able to see the network egress usage on the Railway Dashboard

Verification is a fraud prevention measure designed to filter out spammy actors while financially incentivizing legitimate actors.

Verification status depends on a number of factors, including the age and activity of your GitHub account.

If you have trouble getting verified (often because your GitHub account is not up to the verification standard), don’t fret! You are still able to use a credit card and purchase Railway plans.

As a guiding principle, you can expect to have the Hobby Plan subscription fee waived if:

• You are on the Developer Plan today and have paid a non-zero bill in the last 3 months (used more than the free $5 credit)
• You are a developer with a very active GitHub account, active usage on Railway, and with no spammy or abusive behaviour detected

The free plan was always intended to provide enough Railway credits to get a taste of the platform. Anybody should be able to come to Railway and start deploying their code right away without having to learn complicated tooling like Docker, Kube, or whatever else.

When we gave away $5 / mo in recurring credits, we set the wrong expectation around the service level of the free plan and opened ourselves up to a large amount of fraud.

That’s why we’ve renamed the plan Trial and removed the recurring credits in favor of a one-time grant of $5.

We’re betting that $5 is enough for any new user to come to Railway, play around, find a measure of success, and then be so in love with the platform that they happily smash the upgrade button.

The loss of free recurring credits will be painful for some users. As mentioned previously, we can’t at our scale keep up with the fraud load generated by perpetually free credits.

The intent with the Developer plan was always to make sure that developers could have a scratchpad to deploy their side projects to Railway.

We’ve renamed the plan to Hobby to better communicate that fact and better set expectations about the level of service and support you will receive on this plan.

The big change here is that we’re now charging $5 / mo for this plan, which comes with $5 of usage included.

The rationale here is that we’re once again disincentivizing an abuse vector and better supporting legitimate users.

As a bonus, we’re waiving the $5 subscription fee for all verified users.

The Team plan will now be known as the Pro plan. A Pro seat will still cost $20 / mo (plus usage). Over time we will start to gate advanced features into this plan, like Regions, Replicas, and a whole lot more to come.

This change is pretty much in name only for now, but it opens the door for us to support additional SKUs and plans that don’t fit neatly into the user model.

From August 1 2023, we will start billing $0.10 / GB for any network egress on the platform. We will not charge for any ingress.

We’re obligated to charge for network in order to disincentivize platform abuse. According to our calculations, this should be negligible for most workloads.

However, if you are downloading copyrighted movies, prepare to pay!

If you’re an existing Railway user, you’ll be receiving several emails leading up to the migration with clear instructions for how to proceed if any action is required on your part.

We hope it’s clear that these changes are going to result in a dramatically better service for production Railway users. We’re looking forward to shipping a ton of new features to help make account management easier as well — things like app sleeping, spending limits, and of course a entire smorgasboard of enterprise features.

As always, we want to hear from you!

Our Discord is open and we are always listening to do better.

Thanks for your support,

The Railway Team

Q: Why are you getting rid of $5 / mo free credits?

A: We have to disincentivize abuse. At our scale and with our user base we simply can’t keep up with bad actors taking advantage. We hope you’ll find that $5 not-monthly is plenty to try Railway and have a great experience.

Q: Why can’t I be verified?

A: Most likely you don’t have a sufficient GitHub account — but don’t worry! You can still take advantage of a limited trial and upgrade at any time.

Q: How will I know whether I qualify to get the Hobby Plan subscription fee waived?

A: All existing Railway users will receive emails with more information in the days around July 1, 2023. Qualified users will not need to take any action and will automatically be moved from the Developer Plan to the new Hobby Plan on August 1, 2023.