Render vs Railway: pricing and limits
Updated 2026-10-24
At 100,000 visits a month, a small Node app costs about $28.75 on Render and $14.50 on Railway, and almost all of that gap is bandwidth: Render charges $0.15/GB after 5 GB, Railway charges $0.05/GB from the first GB. Render comes out ahead only when your app is CPU-heavy and light on traffic, because its $7 instance price doesn't move with CPU use.
Cost for one small web service
Assumptions: one always-on service with 512 MB RAM, about 1.5 MB transferred per visit, no database. Render is the $7 "less than 1 CPU" instance (plan 0.5c-512mb) on the free Hobby workspace. Railway is the $5 Hobby plan with about 0.1 vCPU average use (Railway bills actual CPU, so yours may differ).
| Visits / month | Transfer | Render | Railway (Hobby) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | 15 GB | $8.50 | $7.75 |
| 100,000 | 150 GB | $28.75 | $14.50 |
| 1,000,000 | 1,500 GB | $231.25 | $82.00 |
Render: Hobby workspace $0, web service $7/month, 5 GB bandwidth included then $0.15/GB. Railway: Hobby $5/month includes $5 of usage, and if usage goes over $5 you pay total usage; memory about $10/GB-month (0.5 GB is about $5), CPU about $20/vCPU-month, egress $0.05/GB.
What drives the difference
Bandwidth. At 150 GB, Render's bandwidth line is 145 GB x $0.15 = $21.75 and Railway's is 150 GB x $0.05 = $7.50. At 1M visits it's about $224 versus $75. Render's Pro workspace ($25/month) only raises the allowance to 25 GB, at the same $0.15/GB after that.
CPU. Render prices the instance, not what it does: the $7 service costs $7 whether it idles or runs flat out. Railway bills CPU per second at about $20 per vCPU-month, so an app that averages 0.5 vCPU costs roughly $10 in CPU plus $5 in memory, $15 before any bandwidth. For a busy background worker or a CPU-bound API with little outbound traffic, Render's flat price is the cheaper one.
Bigger instances. Render's next step is 1 CPU / 2 GB at $25/month. On Railway the same 2 GB of memory is about $20/month before CPU, so the two converge as you scale up and bandwidth decides it again.
Free tiers
Render has a Free web service (512 MB). It spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic and takes about a minute to wake up. Each workspace gets 750 free instance hours a month, and the filesystem is wiped on every spin-down or redeploy. A Free Postgres database expires 30 days after creation, with a 14-day grace period before Render deletes it.
Railway has a 30-day trial with a one-time $5 credit (no card needed), then a Free plan with $1/month of usage, capped at 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB per service, 1 replica and no custom domains. $1 of usage covers very little always-on time at 0.5 GB, so the Free plan suits a service that sleeps most of the day.
Databases
Render Postgres starts at $6/month (256 MB RAM, 1 GB storage included, then $0.30/GB). On Railway, Postgres is another service billed at the same per-second memory, CPU and volume rates ($0.15/GB-month for volumes), so a small, quiet database adds a few dollars of usage rather than a fixed plan price. How much depends on its actual memory use, which Railway doesn't publish a typical figure for.
Stopping a surprise bill
Railway lets you set a hard usage limit (minimum $10) on any plan. When usage hits it, Railway takes your workloads offline, with emails at 75%, 90% and 100%. You can also cap CPU and memory per replica. On Render, the instance price is fixed, so bandwidth is the line that can grow; Render emails you as you approach usage limits and bills extra bandwidth at $0.15/GB.
Verdict
Pick Railway if your app serves real traffic and stays light on CPU: it's about half Render's price at 100k visits and the hard spend limit is built in. Pick Render if the service burns CPU but sends little data out, or if you want a fixed monthly number for compute. Either way, putting cacheable pages and assets behind a CDN cuts the bandwidth line, which is the biggest cost on both at scale. See also Railway vs Fly.io for a Node API and Railway vs Render vs Fly.io at 100k visits.
Estimates only, checked 2026-10-24 against the official pricing pages and docs listed below. Build minutes (500/month included on Render Hobby, then $5 per 1,000), disks, volumes and custom domains beyond the included ones are excluded.
Sources
- https://render.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-24)
- https://render.com/docs/free (checked 2026-10-24)
- https://railway.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-24)
- https://docs.railway.com/reference/usage-limits (checked 2026-10-24)
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