Bring Back the Free Plan

Railway has re-introduced a free plan after previously removing it due to unsustainable margins. New users get $5 in credits for the first 30 days, followed by $1 in monthly non-rollover credits — enough to run a small app indefinitely. The post recounts how Railway rebuilt its business by exiting Google Cloud Platform, building its own hardware infrastructure (Railway Metal), developing a custom orchestrator and compute stack, and creating an in-house support platform called Central Station. The company now processes over 12 million deploys per month and claims durable product-market fit, which enabled the return of the free tier.