Railway pricing calculator

Why the RAM line grows

Railway bills what a service uses, minute by minute, not the size of a box. That is fair, and it is also why memory is usually the biggest line. At $10 per GB per month, a Node or Python service sitting at 500 MB costs $5 a month just to stay up, and it costs that whether anyone visits or not. CPU is pricier per unit, but most web services spend the day near zero CPU and all day holding their memory.

So anything that grows memory grows the bill. A leak that takes a service from 300 MB to 1.2 GB over a week shows up as a RAM line four times bigger, with no outage to tell you. So does an in-memory cache with no size limit, or a worker that loads a whole export into memory. Watch the memory graph in the service's Metrics tab, not just the invoice.

Copies multiply everything. Each replica is billed separately, and a staging environment that mirrors production is a second bill of the same size unless it sleeps. Railway's Serverless setting puts a service to sleep after 5 minutes with no outbound traffic, but outbound means anything: an open database pool, framework telemetry, a health check to another service. Many services that have it switched on never actually sleep. The hours-awake field above shows what sleeping would save if it works.

The plan fee is not on top of usage, it is a floor. On Hobby you pay $5 or your usage, whichever is higher; on Pro, $20 or your usage. That is why a small project on Pro costs the same $20 whether it uses $3 or $19.

We go through each line with worked numbers in Railway pricing: what you actually pay for.

If your Railway bill is bigger than this page says it should be, send us the bill. It is usually memory, a staging copy nobody uses, or services that are meant to sleep and don't.