Railway vs Render free tier - $5 trial vs 750 hours

Railway is a deployment platform that runs your services, databases, and cron jobs from a Git repo or Docker image, billed by resource usage. Render is a cloud platform that deploys web services, static sites, cron jobs, and databases from a Git repo. Their free paths have different shapes: Railway front-loads a $5, 30-day trial and then keeps a permanent $1-a-month floor, while Render’s 750 free instance hours recur every month. All figures below come from each vendor’s official pricing and docs, checked on 2026-08-21.

Fact	Railway	Render
Free allowance	$5 for 30 days, then $1 per month	750 free instance hours per month
Expiry	Trial credits last 30 days; the later $1 monthly credit does not roll over	Hours reset monthly with no rollover; free Postgres expires 30 days after creation
Payment method	No credit card required	Not stated officially
Compute size	Trial: up to 2 vCPU and 1 GB per service. Free plan: up to 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB	512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU per Free instance

The shape of free

Railway’s trial gives you “$5 in credits for 30 days. No credit card required.” When it ends you land on the Free plan: “$0/month with $1 of monthly usage credits,” and that $1 does not roll over. The honest summary from my Railway entry is a one-time $5 month followed by a permanent but very small $1 monthly allowance.

Render’s free tier recurs instead of ending: Free instances cost $0 per month with 512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU, capped at 750 Free instance hours per workspace per calendar month. Hours reset monthly and do not roll over, and static sites are free. So Railway front-loads most of its free money into one month and keeps a $1 monthly trickle afterward; Render hands out a smaller-per-service but repeating allowance.

Card requirements

Railway’s official wording is “No credit card required” for the trial. Which trial flavor you get, Full or Limited, is decided by GitHub account verification, and the Limited Trial restricts outbound network access and ports; if a trial app cannot reach an external API, that restriction is the first thing to check. Once you pay, Railway no longer offers prepaid credits; since March 30 a card on file with post-paid billing is the payment path.

Render’s docs do not state that a payment method is required to start, and my Render entry records that as not stated rather than upgrading it to a promise. The notable behavior: if you have no payment method on file, services suspend when you hit the free quota instead of billing you.

What you can run

During Railway’s trial each service can use up to 2 vCPU and 1 GB of memory, with 2 replicas and 7-day log retention. The Free plan afterward allows up to 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB per service, 1 replica, and 3-day logs; $1 of monthly usage is enough for a very small always-on process at Railway’s usage rates, and nothing more.

Render’s Free instances are 512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU. A month is at most 744 hours, so the 750 free instance hours can keep one free web service up all month; run two free services and they share the same workspace pool, so both cannot be always-on. The counter is per workspace, not per service.

The spin-down behavior

Render’s free web services spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and take up to about a minute to wake on the next request. Two side effects from the official docs are worth knowing: the filesystem is ephemeral, so anything written to disk is lost on restart, and while a free service is spun down it serves a disallow-all robots.txt, which matters if you expected a free-tier site to be crawled.

My Railway entry records no equivalent spin-down behavior for its Free plan, so I will not claim Railway free services stay warm or do not; what it records are the resource caps above and the $1 monthly ceiling.

Databases are the sharpest edge

On Railway, trial volumes are deleted 30 days after the trial credit expires, so do not leave a database you care about on a lapsed trial. On Render, free Postgres expires 30 days after creation with a 14-day grace period before deletion, and the free Key Value store is in-memory only. On both platforms, treat the free database as scratch space, not storage.

Corrections worth stating

Two claims that circulate deserve flat corrections, in each vendor’s own terms. Railway’s Hobby plan is sometimes described as a free tier; it is not. Hobby costs $5 per month including $5 of usage, and the $5 is charged even if you use less. And Render’s docs say plainly: do not use free instances for production. One asymmetry to note: Railway states “Railway doesn’t currently offer GPU instances,” while my Render entry records no GPU statement either way, so I compare neither on GPU.

How to choose

Choose Railway if you want a bigger first month without a card: $5 of usage with services up to 2 vCPU and 1 GB, enough to test something real, and you can either add a card afterward or live inside the $1 monthly credit. Move any volume you care about before the 30-days-after-expiry deletion.

Choose Render if you want free that recurs: 750 instance hours every month keeps one 512 MB / 0.1 CPU service up all month if you tolerate a spin-down after 15 idle minutes and up to a minute of wake time, with free static sites alongside. Treat free Postgres as a 30-day scratch database.

I have not personally run services on either free path, so this page reports only what the official pages state. The full fine print is in the Railway free trial and Render free tier entries. For the broader decision, read how to choose between a VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or a sandbox. Every grant I track is on the credits index.