Railway and Fly.io are the two developer PaaS options that bill purely on usage — Railway wraps it in named tiers (Free $0, Hobby $5/mo, Pro $20/mo, each including an equal amount of usage credit), Fly.io charges pay-as-you-go with no named plans at all. Railway is the fastest way to get a repo with a real database live; Fly.io is the cheapest way to run containers in 30+ regions with machines that scale to zero. Start on Railway for speed; move to Fly.io when you need the edge or scale-to-zero economics.
Both are Docker-native and meter per second. The real difference is the interface: Railway hides infrastructure behind a visual canvas and auto-config from your code; Fly.io gives you Machines you can reason about — via the flyctl CLI — deployed across 30+ regions with Anycast routing.
| Railway | Fly.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Tiers with included credit: Free $0 ($1), Hobby $5/mo ($5), Pro $20/mo ($20) | Pure pay-as-you-go — no named tiers; use the pricing calculator |
| Free / trial | Permanent Free plan: $0 with $1/mo credit | No permanent free tier for new accounts — short trial only |
| Scale to zero | No — idle services keep billing | Yes — stopped Machines bill only storage ($0.15/GB-mo) |
| Regions | Global deployment, no published region count | 30+ regions with Anycast routing |
| Managed Postgres | Billed on usage, inside the same project | From $38/mo + $0.28/GB storage |
| Egress | $0.05/GB above 100 GB included | Pay-as-you-go — watch bandwidth costs |
| Deploy UX | Connect repo → auto-config; visual canvas; PR preview environments | flyctl CLI + fly.toml; Docker-native control |
| Spend controls | Opt-in hard usage limit (min $10) with email alerts | Machine reservations save 40%; no plan caps |
| Best for | Shipping a full-stack app + database today with zero ops | Global edge apps, spiky traffic, infra control |
Push to deploy: the simplest PaaS for full-stack apps.
Free $0 ($1/mo usage credit); Hobby $5/mo (includes $5 usage); Pro $20
Try Railway →Run containers at the edge, worldwide.
Pay-as-you-go from ~$2/mo for a small app; no free tier for new accoun
Try Fly.io →Railway wins on DX and speed-to-live — nothing deploys a repo with a database faster, and Pro is priced per workspace, not per seat. Fly.io wins on economics and geography: true scale-to-zero, 30+ edge regions, and the lowest raw compute cost of the managed options. Side project or startup MVP? Railway. Global product, spiky traffic, or per-region control? Fly.io.
No single answer — both are usage-based. A small always-on app is roughly $5/mo on either side; scale-to-zero workloads and heavy traffic favor Fly.io, while a steady single-region app with a database is simpler to budget on Railway.
Not for new accounts — free allowances were removed in 2024 and new signups get only a short trial. Railway still has a permanent Free plan with $1/mo of credit.
Railway, by a wide margin: connect your repo and it auto-configures builds, databases, and networking in a visual canvas. Fly.io assumes you are comfortable with a CLI and Docker semantics.