I recently added a volume to one of my Railway projects and noticed it was already reporting around 150 MB of usage, despite my application storing only a small (around 2kb) JSON file in the first minutes.

From what I read in the docs, this is caused by the filesystem metadata and other overheads needed to initialize the volume.

I know that this space is technically necessary for Railway but I don't think it should count towards the customer billable storage nor the volume itself.

If someone adds a 5 GB volume, they should have the full 5 GB available for their own files. If Railway needs another 150 MB for the filesystem itself, why not allocate that separately?

This is what Railway could do better:

  - Exclude filesystem overhead from volume billing so customers only pay for the actual data their applications store. (If that isn't already the case)

  - Add the additional space needed for filesystem metadata separately. For example, a 5 GB volume could have roughly 5.15-5.16 GB allocated internally, while still providing the customer with the full 5 GB of usable storage.

I also wouldn't necessarily remove the overhead from the dashboard (It could still be displayed separately), just not included in billable usage.