Fly.io vs Railway Pricing: The Real Cost in 2026

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You’ve got an app to deploy. Heroku’s free tier is dead, you’ve heard good things about both Fly.io and Railway, and now you’re staring at two pricing pages that both look reasonable until you actually try to figure out what you’ll pay. That’s the problem — both platforms are deliberately vague about real-world costs until you’re already committed.

I’ve run production workloads on both. I’ve migrated projects between them. I’ve been surprised by bills on both. This is the breakdown I wish existed when I was making this decision.

How Fly.io and Railway Actually Charge You

Before comparing numbers, you need to understand the fundamental difference in billing philosophy, because it changes everything.

Fly.io is infrastructure-billed. You’re paying for VMs (called Machines), memory allocation, CPU, and bandwidth — whether or not your app is actually doing anything. It’s closer to a VPS model than a PaaS model. You spin up a Machine, it runs, you pay. Forgot to scale it down after a load test? Bill arrives. This model rewards engineers who think in infrastructure terms and punishes people who just want their app to run.

Railway is usage-billed on a subscription baseline. The Hobby plan ($5/month) gives you $5 of compute credits on top of the subscription, and you only pay for what your services actually consume. It’s much closer to the old Heroku model. Predictable, contained, and the billing dashboard is actually readable by humans.

Fly.io Pricing Breakdown (2026)

Fly.io removed its free tier for new apps in late 2023 and has kept it that way. Here’s what you’re actually paying:

• Free allowance: Technically exists — 3 shared-CPU VMs with 256MB RAM, 3GB persistent storage — but you need a credit card on file, and these allowances are shared across your entire account. In practice, any real app with a database chews through this instantly.
• shared-cpu-1x (256MB RAM): ~$1.94/month per Machine
• shared-cpu-1x (512MB RAM): ~$3.19/month per Machine
• shared-cpu-2x (512MB RAM): ~$6.19/month per Machine
• performance-1x (256MB RAM): ~$7.19/month per Machine
• Postgres (managed): Starts at ~$1.94/month for a tiny instance; a usable dev Postgres (1GB RAM, 10GB storage) runs ~$15–25/month
• Bandwidth: 100GB free outbound per month, then $0.02/GB
• Volumes (persistent storage): $0.15/GB/month

A realistic single-app setup on Fly.io — one web process (512MB), one Postgres instance (1GB RAM), 20GB storage — runs you roughly $30–45/month before you add Redis, background workers, or anything else.

The gotcha: Fly.io bills per Machine, and Machines run 24/7 unless you explicitly configure autostop. If you deploy with two instances for redundancy and forget to set scale-to-zero, you’re paying for both constantly. I’ve seen developers rack up $80+ bills on what they thought was a $20/month app.

Railway Pricing Breakdown (2026)

Railway’s model is cleaner to explain:

• Free Trial: $5 of credits, no credit card required. One-time. Good for kicking the tires, not for anything persistent.
• Hobby Plan: $5/month flat + $5 in included usage credits. Pay-as-you-go beyond that. Supports up to 8GB RAM per service, 100GB disk.
• Pro Plan: $20/month per seat + usage. Removes most limits, adds team features, priority support, higher resource ceilings.
• Compute: ~$0.000463/vCPU/minute, ~$0.000231/GB RAM/minute (roughly $10–15/month for a small always-on service)
• Postgres: Included in usage billing — a small Postgres instance with 1GB RAM runs about $5–8/month in practice
• Bandwidth: 100GB free, then $0.10/GB (more expensive than Fly.io per GB, but most apps never hit this)

A realistic single-app setup on Railway — one web service, one Postgres database, modest traffic — costs $10–18/month on the Hobby plan. That’s meaningfully cheaper than the equivalent Fly.io setup for most developers.

Railway also has proper sleep/wake behavior on the Hobby plan (services spin down after inactivity), which keeps costs low for side projects that don’t need 24/7 uptime. You can disable this if you need always-on.

Fly.io vs Railway Pricing: Side-by-Side Comparison

Factor	Fly.io	Railway
Free tier	Minimal (credit card required)	$5 trial credits, no card needed
Entry paid plan	Pay-as-you-go (~$5–10/mo minimum)	$5/month Hobby
Typical solo app cost	$30–45/month	$10–18/month
Postgres (small)	~$15–25/month	~$5–8/month
Billing model	Per-machine (always-on by default)	Usage-based + flat subscription
Surprise bill risk	High (easy to forget running Machines)	Low (sleep/wake by default)
Global regions	35+ regions, true multi-region	~20 regions, US/EU/Asia
Bandwidth (free)	100GB/month	100GB/month
Bandwidth (overage)	$0.02/GB	$0.10/GB
DX / ease of use	Moderate — requires fly.toml knowledge	Excellent — GitHub connect and go
Scale to zero	Manual config required	Default on Hobby plan
Team plans	Usage-based (no per-seat fee)	$20/seat/month Pro

Where Fly.io Is Actually Cheaper

I don’t want to make this sound like Railway wins on every dimension — it doesn’t.

High-bandwidth applications: If you’re serving a lot of data — video, large file downloads, high-traffic APIs — Fly.io’s $0.02/GB overage vs Railway’s $0.10/GB is a 5x difference. An app pushing 1TB/month of bandwidth pays ~$180 overage on Railway vs ~$18 on Fly.io. At that scale, Fly.io wins decisively on bandwidth costs alone.

Multi-region latency-sensitive apps: Fly.io’s Anycast routing and 35+ regions with genuine low-latency global routing is a real differentiator. If you’re building something where a user in Tokyo getting 200ms vs 40ms matters, Railway can’t match Fly.io’s architecture. Railway is improving here, but Fly.io was built for this from the start.

Teams with many small services: Railway’s $20/seat Pro plan gets expensive for teams. If you have 5 engineers, you’re paying $100/month just in seat fees before a single byte of compute. Fly.io has no per-seat pricing — you just pay for what you run. For larger teams running lean infrastructure, Fly.io’s model is more economical.

Custom hardware needs: Fly.io lets you run GPU Machines, specific CPU architectures, and persistent VMs that behave more like traditional servers. Railway is more opinionated about what you can run. If you need that flexibility, Railway won’t cut it.

Where Railway Is Actually Cheaper (Most Cases)

For the majority of developers reading this — side projects, small SaaS apps, internal tools, APIs with moderate traffic — Railway is cheaper in practice, not just on paper.

The key reason: Railway’s sleep/wake behavior means you’re not paying for idle time. A side project that gets 50 requests/day on Fly.io still costs you $30+/month because those Machines are running 24/7. On Railway, that same project might cost $6–8/month total because it only spins up when needed.

Database costs are also dramatically lower. I’ve run the same Postgres workload on both platforms — Railway’s Postgres comes in at roughly half the cost of Fly.io’s managed Postgres for small-to-medium databases. For a developer running 3–5 projects, this adds up to $30–50/month in savings.

If you want to see what migrating real projects looks like in practice, I wrote about mass-migrating 14 projects from Heroku to Railway in one weekend — including every mistake I made. The short version: Railway’s deployment model is genuinely close to Heroku’s simplicity, which matters when you’re managing multiple apps.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions

Fly.io Hidden Costs

• Zombie Machines: Failed deployments can leave old Machines running. You need to actively monitor with fly machines list and clean up. I’ve had $15 surprise charges from this.
• Volume storage: Fly.io’s persistent volumes at $0.15/GB/month aren’t expensive, but they don’t auto-delete when you delete an app. Orphaned volumes accumulate.
• Wireguard VPN for private networking: Not a direct cost, but the setup complexity costs developer time. Time is money.
• Fly Postgres is self-managed: Their “managed” Postgres still requires you to handle backups, extensions, and upgrades manually. If something breaks at 2am, that’s on you.

Railway Hidden Costs

• Cold start latency: Sleep/wake is great for cost, but a user hitting your app after it’s been idle gets a 5–15 second cold start. For anything customer-facing, you’ll probably disable sleep, which increases your bill.
• Pro plan per-seat fees: As mentioned, teams pay $20/seat. A 4-person team on Pro is $80/month before compute.
• Bandwidth overage: At $0.10/GB, a traffic spike can get expensive fast. Set spending limits in the dashboard.

Use Fly.io If You Need…

• True multi-region deployments with low latency globally
• Fine-grained control over VM configuration, networking, and hardware
• High-bandwidth applications where per-GB egress cost matters
• GPU workloads or non-standard runtime environments
• A team of 5+ where per-seat pricing would be painful
• Persistent long-running processes that can’t tolerate cold starts under any circumstances

Use Railway If You Need…

• The fastest path from GitHub repo to running app (seriously, it’s 3 clicks)
• Predictable, low monthly bills for side projects and small SaaS
• A Heroku-like experience without Heroku’s current pricing
• Multiple small projects where you want centralized billing and dashboards
• Postgres that just works without babysitting
• A platform where you won’t get surprised by zombie infrastructure charges

What About DigitalOcean as an Alternative?

Worth mentioning: if you’ve looked at both Fly.io and Railway and neither feels right, DigitalOcean’s App Platform is a legitimate third option. It’s more expensive than Railway for tiny apps, but the $12/month basic Dyno equivalent gives you always-on compute, managed Postgres, and a company that’s been around long enough that you don’t worry about it disappearing. For teams already using DigitalOcean Droplets for other infrastructure, keeping everything in one ecosystem has real operational value. I compared it in more depth in our best cloud hosting for side projects guide if you want the full picture, and our DigitalOcean vs Hetzner vs Vultr comparison is worth a read if raw VPS pricing matters to you.

My Actual Setup (And What I’d Recommend)

Here’s where I’ve landed after running both in production: Railway for everything until it can’t do it, Fly.io when Railway hits a wall.

Concretely: my personal projects and client side projects all run on Railway. The billing is predictable, the dashboard tells me exactly what each service costs, and I’ve never had a surprise charge. The developer experience is genuinely the best in this category right now — connecting a repo and having it deploy in 90 seconds never gets old.

I keep one Fly.io account active for a project that needs multi-region routing — a latency-sensitive API that serves users in Southeast Asia and Europe, where Railway’s region selection doesn’t give me the control I need. For that specific use case, Fly.io’s architecture is worth the configuration overhead and the higher Postgres cost.

If you’re currently on Heroku and just want to move: go Railway. If you’re building something that needs global edge infrastructure and you’re comfortable with more DevOps work: go Fly.io. If you need something even more managed with a longer track record, DigitalOcean App Platform is worth the slightly higher price for the stability.

The Fly.io vs Railway pricing comparison ultimately comes down to this: Railway charges you for what you use, Fly.io charges you for what you provision. If you’re disciplined about infrastructure management, Fly.io can be competitive. If you just want to ship code and not think about VMs, Railway wins on cost and sanity.

Either way, you’re in better shape than you were on Heroku’s current pricing. That’s the real win here.