Hey there! I've just signed up to look around and evaluate the platform and figured it might be useful to share my first impressions about everything so far!

Pre-signup Evaluation

I found out about you guys while evaluating Rivet which has Railway as one of the listed self-hosting options.

Going to your homepage, the site looks really nice. The homepage is a little animation heavy which slows it up a little bit sometimes, but overall it's pretty great.

I hit your pricing page and somehow I missed the "only pay for what you use by the second", which I just noticed hitting the page now. I was initially a little confused by the numbers on your pricing page because they looked really high for the price.

After reading more closely after signing up to try things out, I realized that the numbers on the pricing page didn't include the usage cost, which explained the large numbers.

But I also didn't see a link anywhere to the active CPU / RAM usage costs, which was kind of annoying honestly. I had to look around the docs to find the actual usage costs page. I would really appreciate, even if it's just a little or footnote with a link to the usage cost details.

That said, the docs page was easy to read after I found it and I think it has all the info I need, so thanks for that.

Signing Up & Asking a Question

I've got some stuff I might be deploying soon so I figured I'd sign up and check things out. During onboarding it had me click through the little dialog thing that had the major poins of the terms of service outlined, first in green boxes, then in red boxes.

I actually thought this was really nice. You know, instead of skipping completely through the ToS, I was actually reading through these boxes, which felt so much more meaningful than default.

I did see this one red box that said not to use Railway for "Mirrors / Userbots". I'm making a chat app that can support bots and bridging to Discord so I wasn't sure exactly whether I was covered under that, so I started looking for the help section.

I found it quickly and landed on this Central Station site, which looks really nice! Great job with this. It keeps a consistent branding and feel and is really fast. I found it easy to find what I was looking for. I ended up joining Discord to ask my question, and then found that you actually briged Discord to this site which is even cooler! And with realtime sync. Excellent job.

Anyway, I asked my question, got my answer really quick with input from a community member & an employee, and it was just really smooth.

Deploying an App

So far all I've done is tried to deploy the Rivet template, which unfortunately didn't work, but I think that's just the Rivet template's fault. Looks like most of the deployments of the template are failing.

Anyway, your web interface is probably the nicest cloud interface I've ever seen, and I've seen several: AWS, Azure, GCP, DO, Vultr, Linode, Cloudflare, Rancher, Portainer, and a couple others at least.

The interface is really fast, and looks great. Your realtime interface and instant feedback for everything, along with useful metrics and logs right at your fingertips. Man, this is just great. Excellent job again.

What I'm Using Right Now

I have a nifty setup for running small servers with minimal system administration using Flatcar Linux for running Docker containers with Portainer.

I'm using DO right now, so while Railway would be really nice, I'm not sure if it will be cheaper yet than DO. It looks like it would be much more expensive if we are running at 100% CPU usage all the time, but like it might be cheaper if we keep the CPU and memory lower. Since Docker itself is taking up more memory than I'd like, we might be able to fit onto Railway cheaper while avoiding some system management overhead.

I use a traefik proxy with some custom dynamic configuration in some cases and I'm not sure that I'll be able to replicate the utility of that on railway in some specific cases. I need to re-evaluate some of the things I'm doing, figure out what we need, and whether or not there are equivalents on Ralway or not.

I'm not 100% sure we're even ready to switch anything up yet, I was just trying things out real quick and was impressed enough so far ( and given a very nice place to put this feedback ), so I though y'all might appreciate my first impressions.

As a founder starting my own business I know how valuable these kinds of takes can be sometimes.

Cheers!