Railway is the infrastructure platform built for developers who want to ship fast without managing servers. Founded in 2020 during Y Combinator's W21 batch, Railway has grown into a beloved alternative to Heroku, offering a better developer experience with more modern infrastructure.

With Railway, you connect your GitHub repo, choose a database, and go live in minutes. Railway handles provisioning, networking, scaling, and deployments automatically — so you focus on your code, not your ops.

Key Features

• Deploy from GitHub, Docker images, or Nixpacks (zero-config builds)
• One-click databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis with backups
• Private networking between services in a project
• Automatic deploys on Git push with rollback support
• Environment variables management across staging/production
• Usage-based pricing with no idle server costs
• CLI for local mirroring and service management

Railway offers a Hobby plan at $5/month for side projects, and Pro at $20/month for production workloads, with usage-based add-ons.