I Cut My Rails Hosting Costs by 70%: Migrating from Heroku to Railway

I Cut My Rails Hosting Costs by 70%: Migrating from Heroku to Railway For a while, I was hosting a small Rails API on Heroku with JawsDB as the MySQL database. It worked perfectly. Heroku’s developer experience is still one of the best out there. But for a small personal project, I realized I was paying more than necessary. So I migrated the app and database to Railway and reduced my hosting costs from roughly ~$20/month to ~$6/month — about a 70% reduction . The best part: the migration took less than 30 minutes . Here’s exactly how I did it. TL;DR I migrated a Rails API from Heroku + JawsDB to Railway . Results: Hosting cost reduced from ~$20/month → ~$6/month Migration took ~20–30 minutes No downtime Database migrated using one streaming command My Original Setup My stack looked like this: Rails API │ Heroku Dyno │ JawsDB (MySQL) Approximate monthly cost: Service Provider Cost App hosting Heroku ~$7–10 MySQL JawsDB ~$10–12 Total ~$20/month Again, not huge — but for side projects, I