Leaving Railway? A Small Backend Costs $20 to $59 a Month on Other Managed Hosts

Railway reopened signups on November 2 after its October security incident, with a catch. New customers must subscribe to Hobby or Pro before deploying, and free trial deployments are still off. If that pushed you to price a move, start with the database. The app is cheap everywhere. Managed Postgres is what makes the bill.

We priced one small backend on six hosts. Railway ($20 to $21 on Pro) and DigitalOcean ($20.15) tie for the cheapest managed option. Render, Fly.io and Koyeb cost $35 to $59, and Hetzner's cheapest servers are marked not available.

How we tested: On November 4, 2026 we ran a small app (Umami 2.19.0, a Next.js analytics tool) and Postgres 17 in Docker, measured their CPU and memory idle and at about 10 requests a second, then priced that setup from each host's own pricing pages, captured the same day. Every screenshot below is ours.

What does the same backend cost on each host?

The workload is one always-on web app, one Postgres database holding 10 GB, and 50 GB of outbound traffic a month. Where the price depends on region we used Frankfurt. Prices are monthly, before VAT, as listed on November 4, 2026. We didn't deploy on any host, so these are list prices, not invoices.

Why 512 MB plans? Because that's all the app needed. It peaked at 212 MiB idle and sat at 199 MiB while serving 1,736 requests in three minutes with no errors. Postgres never went past 47 MiB, but our database held 10 MB, not 10 GB. A real one uses more memory for its cache, so every host is priced at a 1 GB Postgres tier.

How does Railway's usage billing add up?

Railway bills what your containers use, by the minute. Everyone else sells a plan size.

At Railway's rates (checked November 4) our idle month works out like this:

• RAM: 0.183 GB (187.5 MiB) for the app plus 1 GB for Postgres, times $10, is $11.83
• CPU: 0.0057 vCPU on average, times $20, is $0.11
• Volume: 10 GB times $0.15 is $1.50
• Egress: 50 GB times $0.05 is $2.50

That's $15.94 of usage, not the bill. Hobby caps a volume at 5 GB, so a 10 GB database needs Pro, which bills the larger of $20 and your usage. The idle month comes to $20.00. Run the app at our load test's pace around the clock (about 10 requests a second, roughly 25 million requests a month) and CPU climbs to $5.29 and RAM to $11.94, for $21.23 in total.

A database as small in memory as ours doesn't help. The 10 GB volume keeps you on Pro, so the bill stays at $20.

We couldn't check Railway's own meter without an account. We measured with docker stats, which leaves out memory the kernel can reclaim. It may count differently.

Why does managed Postgres decide the bill?

On every managed host, the database is most of the money.

Fly.io's $38 isn't the same product as DigitalOcean's $15.15, to be fair. Fly's Managed Postgres docs say every plan includes high availability, backups and connection pooling. Our $15.15 is DigitalOcean's single-node price, and its 1 GiB plan can't take a standby. Its cheapest Postgres with one is 2 GiB at $60.90 a month (checked November 4).

What do you get on each host?

DigitalOcean: $20.15

The only managed option that lands next to Railway. App Platform's Shared (Fixed) 512 MiB container is $5 and includes 50 GiB of transfer. Our 50 GB is 46.6 GiB, so it fits with nothing extra to pay (over the allowance it's $0.02 per GiB). The database is the 1 GiB, 1 vCPU, 10 GiB Basic node at $15.15. Our 10 GB is 93% of that disk, and DigitalOcean's monitoring docs say to keep disk use under 90%, so plan on adding storage as the database grows.

Render: $35.45

The Hobby workspace is free, and the Starter instance (0.5 CPU, 512 MB) is $7. Postgres at 1 GB is $19 with 1 GB of storage included, so the other 9 GB add $2.70. Bandwidth is where Render bites. Hobby includes 5 GB, then charges $0.15 per GB, so our 50 GB adds $6.75. That's three times Railway's egress rate and more than seven times Fly.io's.

Fly.io: $46.06

Fly's app machine is the cheapest app plan we priced. With the region set to Frankfurt, shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB is $2.53 and extra RAM is $6.93 per GB, so 512 MB is $2.53 plus $1.73, or $4.26. Egress in Europe is $0.02 per GB, so our 50 GB costs $1. Then Managed Postgres Basic adds $38.

Fly has no free tier for new organizations, and its pricing docs say a card is needed once the trial (2 hours of Machine runtime or 7 days) ends.

Koyeb: $59.12

New Koyeb accounts start on the Pro plan at $29 a month, with $10 of compute included. Koyeb's pricing FAQ says you can downgrade to a pay-as-you-go Starter plan but doesn't list its limits, so we priced Pro. The micro instance (0.5 vCPU, 512 MB) is $5.36. Its eco-micro is $2.68 but has a quarter of a vCPU, and our app averaged 0.24 vCPU under load and peaked at 0.45. Postgres Small (0.25 vCPU, 1 GB) is $29.76 a month if it stays awake, and storage is $0.50 per GB. Compute and storage come to $40.12, minus the $10 included, plus the $29 plan. Bandwidth is the one thing Koyeb gives away, with 1 TB included.

Koyeb's databases sleep after 5 minutes without a query, which would cut that $29.76 for a quiet side project. A web app with users keeps it awake, so we priced it always on.

Hetzner Cloud: €11.99, if you run it yourself

This is the "just get a VPS" answer, and it has changed. Every plan on Hetzner's Cost-Optimized page, from the CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, €5.99) up, carried a "not available" badge on November 4.

On the Regular Performance page, the CPX12 (1 vCPU, 2 GB, 40 GB NVMe) is €11.99 a month with 20 TB of traffic in Germany and Finland. That's enough for our app and a Postgres with a 1 GB cache on the same box. The CPX22 with 4 GB is €19.99. Both prices include an IPv4 address and exclude VAT. We didn't try to order one, so we can't say whether every location had stock.

The catch is the work. Postgres backups, upgrades, security patches and the 3 a.m. disk alert are all yours. Hetzner prices its server backups separately, and we didn't include them. If you'd use a panel like Coolify, our Forge vs Ploi vs Coolify comparison covers that side.

Which host should you move to?

• Already on Railway and the incident didn't scare you off? Staying costs about the same as DigitalOcean, $20 on Pro once your database passes 5 GB. Railway recommends that customers who signed up before October 21 rotate the keys stored there, so do that, and keep your config portable.
• Want a managed host at Railway's price? DigitalOcean, at $20.15. It's the only one within a few dollars.
• Want Render's workflow? Budget $35.45, and watch bandwidth if your app serves files.
• Need a highly available database from day one? Fly.io's $38 Postgres includes it, which makes $46.06 fairer than it looks. DigitalOcean's cheapest Postgres with a standby is $60.90 on its own.
• Koyeb? On Pro, its $29 plan fee makes it the most expensive here for a single small app. It makes more sense when you'd use the $10 of compute and the 1 TB of bandwidth.
• Comfortable running a server? Hetzner's CPX12 at €11.99, and keep an eye on the Cost-Optimized page if €5.99 is what you came for.

If uptime is what worries you, we counted twelve weeks of incidents on Railway, Render, Fly.io, Vercel and Heroku in this post. For a feature comparison of the three PaaS hosts, see Railway vs Render vs Fly.io.

Got a setup that prices out differently? Tell us on X at @devtoolpicks.