Great DX, no more free lunch
Plot twist: Railway killed the hobby tier again and the timeline is on fire. If you've been living under a rock, the $5/month minimum is now a $10/month minimum and a bunch of generous limits got trimmed.
The Setup
Railway has always had genuinely great DX — push to deploy, instant Postgres, environment branching that doesn't make you cry. I ran a couple of internal tools for Rebuild Relief on it. Behold the workflow that's leaving:
{`railway login
railway init
railway link
railway up
# Postgres in one click, env vars synced
railway run bun run db:migrate`}The Money Pattern
The new pricing pushes serious users toward Pro and pushes hobbyists straight to Coolify, Dokploy, or Fly.io. Spoiler: Hetzner + Coolify is now $6/month all-in and runs three side projects. The math doesn't favor Railway anymore.
{`# Migrating off — export env, dump db, redeploy
railway variables --json > .env.json
railway run -- pg_dump $DATABASE_URL > backup.sql
# Now point Coolify at the same repo
coolify app create from-git \\
--repo github.com/aidxn/side-project \\
--env .env.json`}The Catch
Here's the thing — Railway's DX is still genuinely best-in-class. The dashboard, the environment branches, the one-click Postgres, the auto-detected build settings. If you've got revenue, you'll happily pay the bill. If you're shipping a portfolio piece, you absolutely won't.
The Verdict
Railway is now a "serious projects only" platform. For my multi-tenant SaaS workloads I'll keep paying — the time saved beats the bill. For experiments, side projects, and the F1 MIDI controller demo? Coolify on Hetzner all day. The free-tier era is over and Railway just confirmed it.