Railway Pricing in India 2026: Free Tier, Plans and INR Cost

Railway pricing looks small: a free tier, Hobby at $5 a month and Pro at $20. The catch is that the plan fee is only a minimum. Railway meters CPU, memory, storage and data transfer by the minute, and the plan fee simply covers the first $5 or $20 of that usage.

This guide explains each plan, what the free tier really gives you, the usage rates, and three bills worked through to the rupee amount on an Indian card. All figures are from Railway’s pricing documentation, checked on 14 October 2026.

Railway pricing in one table: Trial, Free, Hobby, Pro

Pro is priced per workspace, not per seat: adding teammates does not change the bill. Enterprise is a custom contract.

Railway free tier: the $5 trial and the $1 Free plan

Railway’s free tier comes in two steps. A new account gets a Trial: a one-time $5 credit that lasts up to 30 days. If Railway can verify your GitHub account, you get the full trial. If it cannot, often because the GitHub account is new, you get a Limited Trial with restricted outbound network access and only some ports open.

When the 30 days or the $5 run out, the account moves to the Free plan, which adds $1 of credit each month. You can still deploy code and databases on it, within 0.5 GB of RAM per service, one project and three services.

The $1 does not go far. Memory costs about $10 per GB per month, so one service holding 0.5 GB all day uses about $5 a month in memory alone. The $1 lasts roughly six days. Railway staff on its support forum say services stop when the credit is used up, and you redeploy them yourself once next month’s $1 arrives.

Two more rules matter before you put real data on the free tier:

• Volumes are deleted. Railway deletes volumes from Trial accounts 30 days after the credits expire, unless you upgrade before then.
• Sleeping helps, with a cost. Railway’s Serverless setting puts a service to sleep after 10 minutes without outbound traffic, which saves credit. The first request after that wakes it, and Railway warns that this request may return a 502 error.

How Railway pricing meters usage

On Hobby and Pro you pay for what each running service consumes, minute by minute. A service that holds 512 MB of RAM at night with no visitors is still billed for that memory. The rates, from Railway’s docs:

Your bill is the plan fee, plus any usage above what the plan includes:

• usage of $3 on Hobby means a bill of $5;
• usage of $7 on Hobby means $5 plus $2, so $7.

The included usage resets every billing cycle and does not roll over.

Timing is split. The plan fee is billed in advance for the coming month, and any usage above it is billed in arrears for the month just gone. So a single invoice can carry two different months.

Hobby or Pro: what the $5 and $20 buy

Hobby suits one developer, or up to three people, running a few small services. Its limits are generous on size (48 GB of RAM per service) but tight on teams and storage: three members, 5 GB volumes and two custom domains per service.

Pro removes the member limit, raises volumes to 1,000 GB and custom domains to 20 per service, and keeps 30 days of logs. It also unlocks committed spend tiers for larger teams:

Spend limits: an email alert or a hard stop

Because the bill follows usage, set a limit on day one. Railway offers two kinds:

• A custom email alert is a soft limit. You get an email at the amount you choose, and services keep running.
• A hard limit is a real cap, with a minimum of $10. Railway emails you at 75% and 90%. At 100%, every workload in the workspace is taken offline until you raise or remove the limit.

The hard limit protects your card, not your uptime.

Railway pricing on an Indian card: GST, forex and Singapore

Railway prices and bills in US dollars and accepts only bank-issued credit or debit cards. Prepaid and virtual cards are declined. Its FAQ says it may collect sales tax or VAT based on your billing location; it does not mention India or GST by name. Four things decide the rupee amount:

• GST. Indian GST on an online service from abroad is 18%. If your invoice carries it, add 18%. If you are GST-registered and it does not, you usually pay it yourself under reverse charge and claim the credit. Our guide to reverse charge on foreign hosting has the steps; confirm your case with your accountant.
• The exchange rate. We use Rs 95.20 to the dollar, the mid-market rate on 14 October 2026.
• Card forex charges. Many Indian cards add a 3.5% markup plus 18% GST on it, about 4.13% in total. Some cards now offer zero markup.
• Declined payments. Indian users on Railway’s support forum report automatic charges declined by their banks, especially larger ones. Paying the invoice manually, with an OTP, often works.

There is also a speed cost. Railway has no India region: its regions are California, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore. Singapore is the closest, and Indian users on Railway’s forum report extra round-trip delay compared with a Mumbai server.

Railway pricing in practice: three worked monthly bills

The usage figures below are average use over a month and are assumptions for illustration. Your own numbers are on Railway’s usage page.

Bill 1: a side project on Hobby. One small API averaging 0.25 GB of RAM and 5% of a vCPU, with 5 GB of egress. Usage: $2.50 memory, $1.00 CPU and $0.25 egress, so $3.75, inside the $5. Total: $5.00.

Bill 2: an app and Postgres on Hobby. The app averages 0.5 GB and 10% of a vCPU. The database averages 0.5 GB and 5% of a vCPU with a 10 GB volume, and the app sends 20 GB of egress. Usage: $10.00 memory, $3.00 CPU, $1.50 volume and $1.00 egress, so $15.50. Total: 5 + (15.50 - 5) = $15.50.

Bill 3: a small team on Pro. Two app services at 1 GB and a quarter of a vCPU each, Postgres at 2 GB and half a vCPU with a 50 GB volume, Redis at 0.25 GB and 5% of a vCPU, and 200 GB of egress. Usage: $42.50 memory, $21.00 CPU, $7.50 volume and $10.00 egress, so $81.00. Total: 20 + (81.00 - 20) = $81.00.

In rupees, with the GST and forex steps above:

None of these crosses Rs 15,000, the amount above which India’s e-mandate rules ask you to approve each automatic card payment. At today’s rate that happens at a bill of about $128.

When a fixed rupee price beats usage billing

Railway pricing suits traffic that comes in bursts and services that can sleep. For a service that has to stay up all month, a fixed price is easier to plan for. If you host the frontend separately, our Vercel pricing breakdown does the same sums for Vercel.

Voroa’s web services run in Mumbai at fixed monthly sizes. The smallest always-on size, Starter, has 1 GB of memory and 1 vCPU and costs Rs 298 a month, however busy it is. A team plan, Growth, is Rs 499 per month. Prices exclude 18% GST, every payment gets a GST invoice, and you pay in rupees by UPI, an Indian card or netbanking, with no forex markup.

For side projects there is a free Nano size with 512 MB of memory and 0.1 vCPU. The limits that apply to it are listed on the pricing page. Read when a Railway alternative makes sense before you move anything.

Railway pricing FAQ

Is Railway free?

There is a one-time $5 trial for 30 days, then a Free plan with $1 of credit a month. That is enough for a small service that sleeps most of the time, not for one that runs all month.

Does the Railway free tier need a credit card?

Railway ties the trial to GitHub verification rather than a card. If Railway cannot verify your GitHub account you get a Limited Trial, and upgrading to Hobby, which needs a card, removes its network limits.

Is Railway Pro $20 per user?

No. Pro is $20 per workspace and includes $20 of usage. Members are unlimited and do not add a seat fee.

Why is my Railway bill higher than $5?

Usage above the included $5: usually memory held by an always-on service, a database volume, or egress. Railway bills the difference between your usage and the plan fee.

Does Railway charge GST in India?

Railway says it may add sales tax or VAT based on your billing location. GST on a foreign online service is 18%. If it is not on the invoice and you are GST-registered, you usually pay it under reverse charge. A GST invoice for cloud hosting explains what a valid Indian invoice shows. For the same working on a frontend host, see our Vercel pricing guide.

Switching from Railway: the paperwork you stop doing

Usage billing in dollars means a different number, and the same reverse-charge step, every month. Voroa bills in rupees from an Indian entity, with GST on the invoice, so a registered business takes the input tax credit straight from it. There is no reverse-charge GST to pay in cash first, and no card forex markup.

Moving usually costs a month of two bills. To take that off the table, you can apply for migration credits: up to Rs 10,000 set against your Voroa bills, granted by hand after a person reads your application. Applying is not the same as being approved.

The full comparison of a dollar bill and a rupee bill is in INR vs USD cloud hosting.

Try a fixed rupee price for your app

Deploy a GitHub repository to Voroa on the free size and see the paid sizes in rupees before you upgrade. Deploy your first app from GitHub takes a few minutes.

Last checked: 14 October 2026, against Railway’s pricing, free trial, usage limits and regions documentation. Still comparing? Read our Railway alternative guide for India.