Railway vs Vercel
Kofi Agyem, Founder and CEO, CloudzyroPublished
Railway and Vercel side by side on price, limits and how they charge, from each company's own pricing pages, with Cloudzyro as a third option.
| Feature | Railway | Vercel | Cloudzyro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | $1 of usage a month, after a 30-day $5 trial | Hobby: personal, non-commercial use only | Launch: free, business use included |
| Paid plan | Hobby $5 or Pro $20 a month per workspace, including that much usage | Pro: $20 a month per developer seat | Boost: $20 a month per site, team included |
| How usage is billed | CPU, memory and traffic by the second | Seats, plus transfer, requests and functions beyond Pro's included amounts | Flat: compute and traffic included |
| Outbound traffic | $0.05 per GB | 1 TB on Pro, then from $0.15 per GB | Never charged; slowed past the allowance |
Other companies' figures from Railway pricing, Vercel pricing, checked October 31, 2026. Prices change, so check their pages before you decide.
The short answer
Railway runs long-lived services, such as servers, workers and databases, and bills what they use by the second. Vercel is built around frontends and serverless functions, with $20 a month per developer seat on Pro. Choose Railway for backends and full-stack projects with many services; choose Vercel for Next.js frontends that lean on its platform. Cloudzyro is a third option: your site or app runs as a long-lived server at a flat price per site.
Free plans
Railway gives a 30-day trial with $5 of credit, then $1 of usage a month on its free plan, enough for very small projects. Vercel's Hobby plan is free but for personal, non-commercial use only, with 100 GB of transfer a month and no way to buy more. Cloudzyro's Launch plan is free with business use allowed, and sites never sleep.
What a small team pays
Railway Pro is $20 a month per workspace with seats included and $20 of usage; beyond that, a vCPU costs about $20 a month and each GB of memory about $10. Vercel Pro is $20 a month per developer seat, so a team of three pays $60 before usage beyond what's included. Cloudzyro Boost is $20 a month per site, whatever the size of the team, with 2 CPUs, 2 GB of memory and 1 TB of traffic.
Traffic and busy months
Railway charges $0.05 per GB of outbound traffic. Vercel Pro includes 1 TB of transfer, then charges from $0.15 per GB, with a default $200 on-demand budget. Cloudzyro never charges for traffic: a site past its allowance is slowed for the rest of the month and stays online.
Which should you choose?
Choose Railway if you want databases, workers and services together and are happy paying exactly for what each uses. Choose Vercel if your Next.js app depends on Vercel's own platform features and per-seat pricing suits your team. Choose Cloudzyro if you want your website or web app always on, at one flat price per site, deployed from your AI tool, Git or a zip.