a month ago
I'm a hobbyist with some side hustle work building sites and web apps. I have one site here on Railway and the rest are on Vercel.
I pay the monthly £5 for the site and probably don't use anywhere near what's available to me with regards to resource. I pay nothing on Vercel on the free tier and again, don't use what's available to me.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind paying so this isn't a moan.
I find both Railway and Vercel straightforward to use which is great.
What I'm interested in is, why do you guys use Railway instead of the other options available and what do you use Railway for? By that I mean, is it static sites, CRMs etc
1 Replies
a month ago
I prefer Railway because I can keep everything in one place (API, workers, databases, and scheduled jobs). You can assemble a similar setup on Vercel, but it often nudges you toward Vercel-specific primitives and integrations, which can increase platform coupling (while Railway is very docker like).
My rule of thumb:
-> Use Railway when you need long-running compute (APIs/workers) and stateful services (DB/Redis/queues) close to the app.
-> Use Vercel when your app is primarily a Next.js frontend and your backend needs fit well into stateless serverless/edge functions.
