Railway Has a Free Tier — Deploy Any Stack With $5 Monthly Credit and One-Click Templates

Last month a junior dev on my team needed to deploy a Next.js app with PostgreSQL for a demo. No Docker experience. No DevOps knowledge. I told him to try Railway. Twenty minutes later: app live, database connected, auto-deploying from GitHub. He didn't touch a single config file. That's Railway's pitch — and the free tier is genuinely useful. What You Get Free Railway gives every account a $5/month credit. No credit card required to start: $5 monthly credit — covers ~500 hours of a small service 512MB RAM / 1 vCPU per service 1GB disk per service Free PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis — one-click provisioning Custom domains with automatic TLS Auto-deploy from GitHub — push to main, Railway deploys Environment variables — managed per environment Cron jobs — schedule tasks with cron syntax Metrics dashboard — CPU, memory, network monitoring The $5 credit covers roughly one always-on small service or several services that sleep between requests. Quick Start # Install Railway CLI npm install -g @r