Credits
Last checked:Railway free trial: $5 for 30 days, then $1 per month
creditsserverlessrailway
A deployment platform that runs your services, databases, and cron jobs from a Git repo or Docker image, billed by resource usage. Official site
Railway free trial, the facts
| Amount | $5 for 30 days, then $1 per month |
|---|---|
| Grant type | Time-limited free trial |
| Expiry | Trial credits last 30 days; the later $1 monthly credit does not roll over |
| Payment method required | No |
| Withdrawable as cash | No |
| What I ran on it | Not tested yet |
Filed under: Serverless free tiers and creditsFree credits with no card required
Good for
- Deploying a small app or bot for a month on the $5 trial without a card
- Keeping a tiny service alive afterward inside the $1 monthly credit
Not for
- GPU workloads: Railway states it does not currently offer GPU instances
- Anything you cannot afford to lose: trial volumes are deleted 30 days after credit expiry
Railway’s trial gives you “$5 in credits for 30 days. No credit card required.” When the trial ends you land on the Free plan: “$0/month with $1 of monthly usage credits,” and that $1 does not roll over. So the honest summary is a one-time $5 month, followed by a permanent but very small $1 monthly allowance. Checked against Railway’s official pricing and docs on 2026-08-29.
What the trial includes
During the trial each service can use up to 2 vCPU and 1 GB of memory, with 2 replicas; the free-trial docs describe the cores as shared rather than dedicated, and cap projects at 5 services each. There are two trial flavors: a Full Trial and a Limited Trial, decided by GitHub account verification. The Limited Trial restricts outbound network access and ports, so if your test app cannot reach an external API, that restriction is the first thing to check.
After 30 days: the $1 Free plan
The Free plan allows up to 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB per service, 1 replica, and 3-day logs. One dollar of usage credit per month is enough for a very small always-on process at Railway’s usage rates, and nothing more. Unused credit does not carry over.
Hobby is not free
A correction worth stating plainly: 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. Railway also no longer offers prepaid credits; since March 30 a card on file with post-paid billing is the payment path.
The deletion gotcha
Trial volumes are deleted 30 days after the trial credit expires. Do not leave a database you care about on a lapsed trial.
No GPU
Railway states: “Railway doesn’t currently offer GPU instances.” If GPU time is what you are after, the Modal free tier is a monthly allowance on a platform with GPU pricing, and the Daytona $200 credit covers CPU sandboxes only.
What I have done with it
Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.
For similar time-boxed offers, see the Fly.io free trial and the Render free tier, or read how to choose compute. The Render trade-off, a one-shot $5 month against a recurring 750 hours, is laid out in Railway vs Render. Every grant I track is on the credits index.
Railway, common questions
Does the Railway free trial require a credit card?
No. The official wording is "$5 in credits for 30 days. No credit card required." Which trial flavor you get, Full or Limited, is decided by GitHub account verification; the Limited Trial restricts outbound network access and ports.
What happens after the Railway trial ends?
You land on the Free plan: $0 per month with $1 of monthly usage credits that do not roll over. Trial volumes are deleted 30 days after the trial credit expires, so move any database you care about before that.
What changed here
Added Railway: $5 for 30 days, then $1 per month.
Plus 1 recheck that found nothing changed. Every row links to the full record on the changelog, with the official page it was checked against.
Related entries
Fly.io: 2 machine hours or 7 days
Render: 750 free instance hours per month
Netlify: 300 credits per month
Supabase: $0 per month, two free projects
Sources
Last checked:All numbers on this page come from the official pages above, checked on the date shown. If a figure is not stated there, this page says "Not stated officially" instead of guessing.