UPDATE August 2023

Railway have recently removed their free tier, and now provide a hobby tier for $5 a month

Last November Heroku removed their free hobby tier, which left a lot of people looking for an alternative to host their apps with backends for free.

I was recently recommended the Railway.app as an alternative to Heroku thanks to Claire Hardmans recommendation on the Codú discord.

Railway's website states:

"Bring your code, we'll handle the rest. Made for any language, for projects big and small. Railway is the cloud that takes the complexity out of shipping software."

What does Railway offer?

Railway provides a starter tier, which allows user to trial the platform without providing a credit card. This level gives users 512mb of RAM and a shared PCU/container and 1gb of disk space. Users are provided $5 of free credit/500 hours of usage, and deployments will shut off once the limit is reached (so no sneaky bills)

They also provide a developer tier which can either be prepaid or usage-based, and this tier is still free if you stay below the $5 free credit.

So I thought I'd try it out and transfer over my apps from Heroku to Railway (spoiler: it's super simple and quick!)

Migration Instructions

1. Create a Railway account and connect to your GitHub.

2. On the Railway site select:

   Create a new project
   🔻
   Deploy from a Github repo
   Choose which repo you want to deploy
   🔻
   Add variables

3. Copy over all your variables from Heroku to Railway.

4. Once deployment is successful, you can find the domain address in the projects settings, or on your dashboard.

And thats it! It really is that simple

I'd love to hear if you use Railway and what you think, or if you're using another service to host your projects that you think is even better - leave me a comment below 😊

🚝 Railway Resources

Railway.app

Railway Pricing Tiers

Railway Docs