Fly.io vs Railway: Real Costs in 2026
Both bill by usage, both deploy from a CLI or a git push, and both dropped their free tiers. Below that surface they are quite different: Fly.io is infrastructure you drive yourself across regions, Railway is a workspace that hides the machine.
The short answer
Fly.io is cheaper for small always-on workloads: a shared-cpu-1x machine with 256 MB is $2.43/mo, versus roughly $30/mo on Railway for 1 vCPU and 1 GB. Railway has the better developer experience and cheaper databases. Fly wins on multi-region and price; Railway wins on how little you have to think.
All prices read off each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-08-06.Micro VMs you place in regions yourself. Pay-as-you-go, no plans.
Dimensions where the two are close enough that it should not decide anything.
One workspace, per-second metering, the nicest dashboard in the category.
Fly.io vs Railway, row by row
A winner is called on every row. Where they are genuinely level, the row says so.
| Dimension | Fly.io | Railway | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier for new signups | None. Legacy free allowances honoured for old orgs only | 30-day trial with $5 credit, then a Free plan capped at 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB | Railway |
| Cheapest always-on workload | $2.43/mo (shared-cpu-1x, 256 MB) | $5/mo Hobby minimum | Fly.io |
| 1 vCPU + 1 GB running 24/7 | $7.12/mo (shared-cpu-1x, 1 GB) | About $30.42/mo at published per-second rates | Fly.io |
| 2 vCPU + 2 GB running 24/7 | $14.24/mo (shared-cpu-2x, 2 GB) | About $60.84/mo | Fly.io |
| Managed Postgres entry price | $38/mo Basic, plus $0.28/GB storage | Metered like any service, a small one is a few dollars | Railway |
| Persistent storage | Volumes $0.15/GB-mo, snapshots $0.08/GB-mo with 10 GB free | Volumes about $0.16/GB-mo, 5 GB cap on Hobby | Fly.io |
| Egress | $0.02/GB North America and Europe, $0.04 Asia Pacific, $0.12 Africa and India | $0.05/GB flat | Fly.io |
| Multi-region | Core feature, anycast routing across regions on five continents | Concurrent global regions on Pro | Fly.io |
| Developer experience | flyctl and fly.toml. Powerful, and you will read the docs | Push a repo, get a URL. Best-in-class dashboard | Railway |
| Support | Paid support from $29/mo, community otherwise | Community on Hobby, Railway support on Pro | Railway |
| Extras that bill separately | Dedicated IPv4 $2/mo, certificates $0.10/mo after the first 10 | Object storage $0.015/GB-mo | Tie |
| SSH into the running app | Yes, fly ssh console into the machine | No native SSH | Fly.io |
Where Fly.io wins
Much cheaper small machines
A shared-cpu-1x machine with 256 MB is $2.43/month and 512 MB is $3.99/month in Chicago. There is no cheaper way to keep a small always-on process running on either platform, and Railway has no fixed-price equivalent at all.
Real multi-region deployment
Fly runs your app in regions across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Oceania, South America and Africa, and routes users to the nearest one over anycast. If latency in Sydney and Frankfurt both matter, this is the whole reason to choose Fly.
Cheap egress and free inbound
Outbound transfer is $0.02/GB in North America and Europe. Railway charges $0.05/GB. On a bandwidth-heavy app that gap compounds.
Where Railway wins
Databases that do not start at $38
Fly Managed Postgres starts at $38/month for the Basic plan (shared-2x, 1 GB) plus $0.28 per provisioned GB of storage. On Railway a Postgres is just another metered service, so a small one costs a few dollars. For a DB-backed side project this single line flips the total.
You never touch infrastructure
No fly.toml, no machine placement, no regions to reason about. Push a repo, get a URL. Fly rewards people who want the control and punishes people who do not.
Predictable minimums with credit
Hobby is $5/month including $5 of usage and Pro is $20/month including $20, so light months cost exactly the subscription. Fly is pure pay-as-you-go with no included allowance for new organizations.
What it actually costs
A small Python API with a Postgres database, 1 GB of RAM, running all month with light traffic
- shared-cpu-1x 1 GB machine: $7.12/mo
- Managed Postgres Basic: $38/mo
- 10 GB DB storage: $2.80/mo
- Egress 20 GB: $0.40
- Hobby minimum: $5/mo (credited)
- App compute and RAM: about $30/mo
- Postgres service: metered, a few dollars
- Egress 20 GB: $1.00
- Build plan: $7/mo (2 vCPU, 2 GB, 25 GB disk)
- PostgreSQL inside the pod: $0
- Egress: not metered
- SSH included
Run Postgres yourself on a Fly machine instead of Managed Postgres and Fly drops to roughly $15/mo, which is the configuration most Fly side projects actually use. The $48 figure is what the managed path costs, and it is the number people are surprised by.
The third option: one flat price, database included
Both of these bill you for every part separately, and on both the database is the line that hurts. InstaPods sells a whole Linux server per pod at a flat monthly price with root and SSH: PostgreSQL, MySQL or Redis installs inside the same pod at no extra cost, bandwidth is not metered, and $7/mo buys 2 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM and 25 GB of disk. For a single-region app with a database, it is usually the cheapest of the three by a wide margin.
Honest limitation: single region per pod and no anycast. If your users are spread across continents, Fly.io's multi-region routing is a genuine capability we do not have, and no amount of price advantage substitutes for it.
Deploy on InstaPods $3/mo flat - $10 credit when you add a cardHow to choose
Frequently asked questions
Is Fly.io cheaper than Railway?
For compute, clearly yes. A shared-cpu-1x machine with 1 GB is $7.12/month on Fly.io against roughly $30/month on Railway for the same 1 vCPU and 1 GB running continuously. The picture reverses if you want a managed database, because Fly Managed Postgres starts at $38/month while a small Railway Postgres is metered at a few dollars. Prices verified 2026-08-06.
Does Fly.io still have a free tier?
Not for new organizations. Fly documents that the old free allowances (three shared-cpu-1x 256 MB machines and 3 GB of volume storage) are honoured only for organizations that were already on the deprecated Hobby, Launch or Scale plans. New accounts are pay-as-you-go from the first machine, which at $2.43/month is close enough to free for a small app.
How much is Fly.io Managed Postgres?
The Basic plan is $38/month for a shared-2x cluster with 1 GB of memory, Starter is $72/month with 2 GB, and Launch is $282/month. Storage is $0.28 per provisioned GB for a 30-day month on top. Many Fly users run Postgres themselves on a plain machine instead, which costs whatever that machine costs.
Which has better developer experience?
Railway, comfortably, if you define that as time from repository to running URL. Fly.io gives you more control over regions, machine sizes and networking, and expects you to use it via flyctl and a fly.toml file. Whether that is power or friction depends on whether you wanted to make those decisions.
Can I run multi-region on Railway?
Railway offers concurrent global regions on the Pro plan, but it is not the same product as Fly.io's anycast routing, where every request is served from the nearest region by default. If low latency on several continents is the requirement, Fly.io is built for it and Railway is not.
Sources
Every number on this page was read from these pages on 2026-08-06. Vendors change pricing without notice, so check the source before you commit budget.