Hi Railway team,

I want to report Cloud Agent lifecycle as a billing trap.

I used a Cloud Agent briefly to see how it works — on the order of an hour, not as an always-on machine. Then I disconnected and stopped using it. I assumed it would auto-sleep or time out after ~30 minutes, like Sandboxes (idleTimeoutMinutes default 30 on Hobby/Pro).

It did not. Two Cloud Agent VMs stayed running for weeks with no client connected. For the previous billing period (16 Aug 2026 – 16 Sep 2026) this showed up as $68.90 VM Usage on the project usage page.

That is the trap: a user tries the agent for an hour, closes the terminal, thinks they are done, and the VM keeps running and billing indefinitely at VM rates ($50/GB RAM/month) until they find railway ca sleep / railway ca delete or delete the whole project.

Docs confirm this is current behavior:

“Disconnecting leaves the cloud agent running. There is no idle timeout. Stop compute explicitly when you no longer need the machine awake.”

“A running agent bills for compute while it is awake, including when no client is connected.”

Sandboxes auto-destroy on idle. Cloud Agents do not. Closing the client feels like “I’m done.” It is not. There is no idle sleep and no prominent warning that a one-hour trial will keep billing for the rest of the month.

I have since deleted the project to stop further charges.

Please

1. Treat this as a product issue: default idle sleep (like Sandboxes), or a very clear warning that disconnect does not stop billing and that a short session can run forever.
2. Credit the $68.90 VM Usage from 16 Aug – 16 Sep. I used the agent for a short test, not for a month of compute.

Thank you.