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Railway

Railway is a newer, developer-friendly platform-as-a-service made by Railway Corp, tied for #42 among cloud platforms in developer surveys at roughly 1.5% usage share. It aims to bring back the simplicity Heroku once had — deploying a full-stack app together with a managed database in a few clicks or one CLI command — but with a modern dashboard and a generous free starter tier. It's freemium, with usage-based pricing beyond the free allowance.

Quick facts
Type: Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
Made by: Railway Corp
License: Proprietary, freemium (usage-based pricing)
Platforms/Hosting: Fully managed cloud platform
Primary use case: Deploying full-stack apps with databases attached, with minimal configuration

Jump to: Example Getting started Best for

Example

Link a local project to a Railway service, then deploy straight from your terminal without needing a Procfile or Dockerfile.

# link this local folder to a Railway project
railway link

# deploy the current directory
railway up

# open a shell with your project's env vars injected,
# useful for running migrations against the linked database
railway run npm run migrate

Getting started

Install the CLI, log in through the browser, then link or create a project from inside your repo.

# install the Railway CLI
npm install -g @railway/cli

# authenticate (opens a browser login)
railway login

# initialize a new project in the current folder
railway init

Best for: Indie developers and small teams shipping side projects or early-stage startups who want Heroku-era simplicity — attach a Postgres/Redis instance, deploy from git or CLI, and skip infrastructure configuration entirely.