Railway's pricing page lists four plans, and the first one is headlined Free — $0 per month. Read the line directly underneath it:
Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 per month
So the plan named Free is $0 for thirty days and a dollar a month after that. It also caps each service at 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB of RAM, with 0.5 GB of volume storage.
A dollar is not a lot of money. That isn't the point. The point is that "free tier" round-ups keep sorting Railway into the free column on the strength of the plan's name, and anyone building a comparison — or picking a host precisely because they want a zero-dollar bill and no payment relationship — is working from a wrong premise.
What makes this one easy to get wrong is that the internet currently holds two stale versions of Railway at once. Articles written before the change say Railway killed its free tier in 2025 and offers only a one-time $5 trial credit, which is no longer true. Articles written after it say Railway has a free plan again, which is true in name and misleading in substance. Both are confidently wrong in opposite directions.
Worth checking the actual pricing page rather than trusting either.
Current Railway numbers and how the plans compare: https://toolfreebie.com/railway-heroku-alternative/
