Railway

Most hosts want your frontend somewhere and your API somewhere else. Railway takes a repository, works out how to build it, and runs it — API, worker, frontend, and a Postgres instance side by side in one project, wired together by environment variables it fills in for you.

That makes it the default when your app has a server in it: a Django or FastAPI backend, an Express API, a Discord bot, a cron worker, anything that has to stay running and hold a connection to a database.

What the free tier really is link

Railway’s free allowance is the smallest in this category and the one people are most often surprised by.

$1/month runs an experiment, not a service that stays awake. Treat Railway as free to prove the idea, then $5/month to keep it alive — and be glad the ceiling appears as a paused service rather than a surprise invoice.

Deploy from the dashboard link

The path with the fewest steps:

1. New Project → Deploy from GitHub repo, pick the repository.
2. Railway detects the language and builds it. Node, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, and a Dockerfile all work without configuration.
3. New → Database → Add PostgreSQL in the same project.
4. In your service’s Variables tab, reference the database: DATABASE_URL=${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}.
5. Settings → Networking → Generate Domain gives you a public *.up.railway.app URL.

The ${{...}} reference matters: it re-resolves if the database is recreated, so nothing breaks the way a pasted connection string does.

Deploy from the CLI link

  npm install -g @railway/cli
railway login
railway init                 # create or link a project
railway up                   # build and deploy the current directory
railway logs                 # tail the running service
railway variables            # list what the service can see
railway run npm run dev      # run locally with production variables injected
  

railway run is the one to remember — it saves keeping a second copy of every secret in .env.

Running a frontend and a backend together link

Add two services from the same repository and give each a root directory (Settings → Root Directory, e.g. apps/api and apps/web). Then point the frontend at the backend by reference rather than by URL:

  NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL=https://${{api.RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}
  

Preview environments work the same way, which is what makes a monorepo pleasant here: one push, both halves rebuilt, references still correct.

Keeping the bill down link

• Sleep what doesn’t need to be awake. App sleeping suspends a service with no traffic; the first request after that pays a cold start of a few seconds.
• Watch egress. Serving images and video from the app container is the usual reason a $5 project becomes a $20 one — put files on R2 instead.
• Set a usage limit in the project settings. Railway will stop the service instead of letting it run up a bill.
• One project, many services. Splitting into several projects loses the private network between them and pushes traffic out over the public internet.

When it isn’t the right pick link

A pure static site or a Next.js app with no long-running process gets a bigger free tier and a better CDN from Vercel. Railway earns its keep the moment something has to stay running.

Next link

For the same containers, in several regions at once → Fly.io