Fly.io vs Railway Pricing: Full 2026 Breakdown

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You’re done with Heroku. You’ve narrowed it down to Fly.io or Railway. Now you’re staring at two pricing pages that are written in completely different units — one bills by machine size and GB-hours, the other by resource usage per minute — and you can’t figure out which one will actually cost you less at the end of the month.

I’ve run production workloads on both. I’ve hit billing surprises on both. This breakdown cuts through the marketing language and gives you real numbers for real use cases so you can make the call and move on.

Quick Verdict (TL;DR)

The Pricing Models Are Fundamentally Different

Before comparing numbers, you need to understand that Fly.io and Railway don’t just charge different amounts — they charge for different things. This is the source of most “which is cheaper” confusion online.

How Fly.io Charges You

Fly.io runs on a VM-based model. You’re paying for compute machines (called “Fly Machines”), and the billing is based on GB-hours of RAM + vCPU-hours while the machine is running. Key points:

• Machines can be stopped automatically when idle (this is their “scale to zero” feature)
• You pay for persistent volumes separately (per GB per month)
• Outbound bandwidth is charged after a free tier (100GB/month free)
• Postgres databases run as separate Fly apps — you pay for those machines too
• Free allowances: 3 shared-CPU VMs with 256MB RAM each, 3GB persistent storage, 160GB outbound transfer

The free tier is real and usable, but it evaporates fast when you add a database. A single Fly Postgres instance with 1GB RAM will eat your free allowance on its own.

How Railway Charges You

Railway uses a resource-consumption model. You’re billed for CPU, RAM, and egress actually consumed — measured per minute. The plans work like this:

• Hobby Plan: $5/month — includes $5 of usage credits. Most small projects never exceed this.
• Pro Plan: $20/month — includes $20 of usage credits, higher resource limits, priority support, team features.
• Usage beyond your included credits is billed at: ~$0.000463/vCPU/minute, ~$0.000231/GB RAM/minute, $0.10/GB egress after 100GB
• Databases (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB) are first-class services — same usage-based billing applies

The $5 Hobby plan is genuinely enough for a Node.js or Python app with light traffic and a small Postgres database. I ran a side project with ~500 daily active users on it for three months without going over.

Side-by-Side Pricing Comparison

Factor	Fly.io	Railway
Free Tier	Yes — 3 shared VMs, 3GB storage, 160GB egress	Trial only ($5 one-time credit, no card needed)
Entry Paid Plan	Pay-as-you-go (no minimum)	$5/month Hobby (includes $5 credit)
Compute Pricing	~$0.0000022/vCPU/second, ~$0.0000032/GB RAM/second	~$0.000463/vCPU/min, ~$0.000231/GB RAM/min
Storage	$0.15/GB/month (volumes)	$0.25/GB/month
Egress	Free up to 100GB, then $0.02/GB	Free up to 100GB, then $0.10/GB
Scale to Zero	Yes (configurable)	Yes (on Hobby, configurable on Pro)
Managed Postgres	Yes (billed as a separate Fly app)	Yes (first-class service, same usage billing)
Global Regions	30+ regions	~10 regions (US, EU, Asia-Pacific)
Team Plan	$29/month/org + usage	$20/month Pro (includes team features)
Support	Community + paid plans	Community + priority on Pro

Real-World Cost Scenarios

Theoretical pricing tables are useless without context. Here’s what you’d actually pay for three common developer scenarios.

Scenario 1: Small Side Project (Low Traffic)

Stack: Node.js API + Postgres database, ~100 requests/day, hobby project
Fly.io cost: Likely $0 if you stay within the free tier (1 shared-CPU-1x machine + Postgres on a shared machine). Watch out: if your Postgres machine stays awake, you’ll burn the free allowance faster than expected. Real cost: $0–$5/month.
Railway cost: $5/month flat (Hobby plan). The included credits will cover this easily — you won’t pay a cent over $5.

Winner: Fly.io (potentially free, Railway has a hard $5 floor)

Scenario 2: Growing Web App (Moderate Traffic)

Stack: Python/Django app + Postgres + Redis, ~10,000 requests/day, 512MB RAM app, 1GB RAM database
Fly.io cost: You’re past the free tier. A shared-CPU-1x machine with 512MB RAM runs ~$5.70/month. Add a 1GB RAM Postgres instance (~$7.20/month) and 10GB volume (~$1.50/month). Total: ~$14–16/month.
Railway cost: At this traffic level with these resources, you’ll likely consume $12–18 in usage credits. On the $5 Hobby plan, you’d pay $5 + overage, totaling ~$12–18/month. On the Pro plan, $20 covers it with room to spare.

Winner: Roughly equal. Fly.io is slightly cheaper on compute; Railway is simpler to predict.

Scenario 3: Production App with Real Scale

Stack: Go microservice, 2 vCPU / 2GB RAM, multiple regions, 500GB egress/month
Fly.io cost: 2 vCPU / 2GB RAM machine ~$30.72/month. Egress: 400GB over free tier at $0.02/GB = $8. Multi-region replicas multiply machine costs. Total: $40–80/month depending on regions.
Railway cost: Same compute at Railway’s rates runs higher per-minute. Egress at $0.10/GB after 100GB = $40 in egress alone. Total: $60–120/month.

Winner: Fly.io — significantly cheaper egress rates ($0.02 vs $0.10/GB) make a huge difference at scale. This is where Fly.io’s pricing model shines.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About

Fly.io Hidden Costs

• Machines left running: If you deploy a machine and forget to configure auto-stop, it runs 24/7 and you pay for every second. This is the #1 surprise bill on Fly.
• IP addresses: Dedicated IPv4 addresses cost $2/month each. Fly gives you a shared IPv4 free, but some setups require dedicated IPs.
• Volume snapshots: Automated backups via volume snapshots are billed separately.
• Postgres is a DIY Fly app: You manage it yourself. Fly provides tooling, but it’s not a fully managed database service. If it crashes, you’re on the hook.

Railway Hidden Costs

• Egress is expensive at scale: $0.10/GB is 5x Fly.io’s rate. If you’re serving media or large payloads, this adds up brutally fast.
• The Hobby plan resource limits: Hobby caps you at 8GB RAM and 8 vCPU per service. Most projects won’t hit this, but it’s a wall if you do.
• No persistent disk on Hobby: You need the Pro plan for persistent volumes beyond ephemeral storage.

Developer Experience: Where the Real Cost Is

Pricing isn’t just dollars — your time has a cost too. And this is where the two platforms diverge most sharply.

Railway’s DX is genuinely excellent. Connect a GitHub repo, push code, it deploys. The dashboard shows you what you’re spending in real time. Database provisioning is a few clicks. If you’ve ever done the Heroku workflow, Railway feels like Heroku if Heroku had been built in 2024. I’ve seen developers go from zero to deployed in under 10 minutes with no prior Railway experience.

Fly.io has a steeper learning curve — but it rewards you. The flyctl CLI is powerful but quirky. The fly.toml config file has non-obvious behavior around auto-start/auto-stop. Multi-region deployments require understanding how Fly routes traffic. If you’ve ever been confused why your app isn’t scaling down and you’re getting billed, welcome to the Fly.io learning tax.

If you’re curious about the real-world pain of platform migrations, I wrote a detailed account of migrating 14 projects from Heroku to Railway in a single weekend — including every mistake I made. Worth reading before you commit to either platform.

Use Fly.io If…

• You need your app deployed in 10+ global regions (Fly has 30+, Railway has ~10)
• You’re serving high egress volume (Fly’s $0.02/GB vs Railway’s $0.10/GB is a massive difference)
• You want true VM-level control — custom Docker images, specific machine types, GPU access
• You’re building latency-sensitive apps that need to run close to users worldwide
• You’re comfortable with a CLI-first workflow and don’t mind reading docs
• Your project might genuinely run within the free tier (3 small VMs is real)

Use Railway If…

• You’re migrating from Heroku and want the least friction
• You want a predictable $5 or $20/month bill without doing mental math
• Your team includes non-DevOps people who need to deploy without a manual
• You’re running multiple small services (Railway’s per-service model handles this cleanly)
• You need managed databases without babysitting them
• You value a dashboard that actually shows you what’s happening

What If Neither Is Right?

If you’re finding that both platforms feel limiting — Railway too simple, Fly.io too opaque — it might be worth looking at a VPS approach instead. DigitalOcean’s App Platform sits in an interesting middle ground: managed deployment with VPS-level pricing transparency. Their Droplets give you raw compute starting at $4/month, and you can layer your own deployment tooling on top. It’s more setup work, but you own the infrastructure.

For a broader look at your options, our best cloud hosting for side projects guide covers eight platforms with honest pros and cons for each.

Pricing Verdict: Which Is Actually Cheaper?

Here’s the honest answer: it depends on your egress volume more than anything else.

For apps with low-to-moderate traffic and small data transfer, Railway and Fly.io are within $5–10/month of each other. Railway wins on simplicity; Fly.io wins on free tier availability.

For apps with significant outbound data transfer (APIs serving large responses, file downloads, media), Fly.io is dramatically cheaper at scale. The 5x difference in egress pricing ($0.02 vs $0.10/GB) is not trivial.

For teams who value their time over marginal infrastructure savings, Railway’s DX premium is worth the slight cost difference at small scale.

Final Recommendation

Start with Railway. The $5 Hobby plan is low-risk, the deployment experience is smooth, and you’ll know within a week if it meets your needs. If you hit the egress wall or need more global distribution, migrate to Fly.io — the migration isn’t painless, but it’s manageable.

Don’t start with Fly.io unless you already know you need multi-region deployment or you have high egress volume. The learning curve cost is real, and for most projects, you’re optimizing for a problem you don’t have yet.

If you’re building something more ambitious and want to compare the full landscape of cloud options, check out our DigitalOcean vs Hetzner vs Vultr comparison — sometimes a plain VPS is the right answer and both Railway and Fly.io are overkill.

Whatever you pick: set a billing alert on day one. Both platforms can surprise you if you’re not watching.