Yes. Some of the API responses for my app are slow. Love to see how it will make a difference if it was deployed to another server somewhere in Europe or Asia

Same here. My frontend is deployed to vercel, European region, and calls to Strapi in the US are a bit slow. Having both in Europe would help boost speed and core web vitals. I'd thank a lot if we hobby users could choose region.

Would be really nice to see that.

Absolutely

Yes please, I can't migrate to Railway because I need EU

Needing EU is sounding a little more like a Pro use-case, i'm curious to hear a hobby use-case for needing EU?

My other services are solely located in the EU and I am also located EU so it will be much more comfortable, I don't need a specific region for each app, just the ability to set the default region in the EU for my account cause now it's US and I can't change it, so ping is pretty high which is annoying.

Needing EU is sounding a little more like a Pro use-case, i'm curious to hear a hobby use-case for needing EU?

For EU users as I am it's not a Pro use-case at all. For me it would be also nice if I could deploy only to the EU region and I couldn't set it to something else.

Hobby users could set their region and deploy into it only.

the team has talked about allowing a single region for the entire hobby account, but this would only be considered once pro users get multiple regions per service

It seems there's an audience gap between Hobby and Pro. I'm between "indie hacker deploying hobby projects" and "professional developer shipping to production". I'm much more of the latter, but I run solo. I don't need team support, and $20/month is not a competitive price for me, considering my apps don't need all those resources (because my apps are optimized), and the competition allows Region selection at low tiers or even for free.

If Railway is determined to gate Region selection behind payment, maybe introduce an intermediate plan between Hobby and Pro? Although I think Hobby users should just be able to use Region selection as is. There's already a financial commitment (after the discount) on Hobby that would justify it, IMO.

Or maybe rename Hobby to something like Personal, to remove this notion of "hobby" projects that seems to be directly guiding this decision.

the 5$ per month with included usage does not justify choosing a region per service, or the planned multi-regions per service, otherwise they would already be on hobby, and in my opinion, choosing a single region and choosing multiple regions per service should very much a pro only thing as a little more latency would not affect hobby workloads significantly. instead what would likely happen (as it's been talked about, and mentioned above) is allowing hobby users to select a single region for the entire account.

While I plan to switch to pro, for hobby it would be much of a benefit to at least allow to select a region for the whole account.

totally agree, at least select one region for whole account and deploy all services to this one region without asking.

☝️

I Would also love to have EU available on the hobby plan! Wouldn't mind it being a account wide setting either.

Pro user here. Happy to see regions goto Hobby also.

Some thoughts on Hobby Regions:

• Should be limited to 1 region.

• RE: Angelos concerns about regions for hobby, I expect what you could do is have a waiting list (sorta like priority boarding) where you join a queue to unlock this feature (kinda like, boarding a train?). That way you can get a good idea of what resources to provision.

• An animation, moving your hobby project from one region to another, would be so sweet (maybe a train?). % could be, your position in the queue.

Some thoughts about Regions for Pro:

• Need Africa and South American regions, please make that a 2024 goal!

My toughts on it:
It would be nice to have a single region for hobby users.
Altho this might not be required for everyone.
The jump in pricing between 5 dollars and 20 is a bit much for most people.
Maybe you can consider it as an addon of some sort? (so you pay for hobby + optional regions)
Something like 2,50 would be fine for most people i guess.

If possible, for hobby plan, the ability to change the region should be available not only for the entire account/all projects, but also individually for each project. On the Pro version, this can be done more granularly for each service.

This is important because, for instance, one project might be intended for one region/audience while another is for a different region/audience.

Second previous comment, In my opinion, a lot of users just want ability to choose region without extra features and current jump in price only for it is a bit much.

I think a user region is enough for the hobby plan. Project based regions should have you go Pro. As-is, most of the use cases for hobby plan barely warrant regions. Contrast that with the cost of operating those servers, and it would probably mean a price increase for hobby plan. I'd rather not.

If you have multiple audiences that require low latency, that should be a Pro usecase, and not a hobby one.

Afaik there are really only 3 reasons why you would want a region on hobby plan:

• app latency

• the assurance that you can keep using railway while EU data laws get stricter

• running game servers

The first two are almost exclusively Pro usecases (though the EU laws may affect hobby users too) while the latter is just a bad idea to run on railway in general, even if nothing is stopping you from doing it. (Exception: Pro use case, hosting your self built game, this i consider to fall under app latency)

I agree entirely with lelebees here ⭐️

same here. railyway's edge network already works kinda like a cdn and it's not painfully slow. but having the origin server closer to me should be really nice anyway

That would be nice!

This would be really great! Atleast the ability to specify one region for the whole account will be beneficial too.

I just want us-south1-a/b/c, so my stuff is hosted in Dallas. Please and thank you!

As a Hobby user I would appreciate having the option to set a region for my account along with all my projects to be within EU. I'm location in the EU, my project's users are located in the EU, I don't need Pro plan features

An account-wide region setting would be nice for Hobby users IMO. I don't think that feature alone is worth the 15$/mo hop to Pro. Maybe as a paid addon as some else suggested.

Yes, please. I live in the EU and the only reason why I'm not using Railway right now is because I can't deploy my services in the EU region. The ability to define a region for the entire account would be perfect. I'm looking forward to seeing this happening soon. Thank you.

Being able to select one region account wide on hobby plan would be awesome, as a EU user the latency is significant noticable in my project. I'm trying out the pro plan rn but I will cancel it again since I only upgraded for the region and paying 20$ just for that is not competitive at all. I hope you can work out something nice, love using railway!

I'll get a tad off-topic here, but for EU to US the added latency should only be around +250ms, that wouldn't be detrimental to hobby workloads. anything more and there are very likely other issues at play, such as having your service connect to a database outside of railway's private network.

I'll get a tad off-topic here, but for EU to US the added latency should only be around +250ms, that wouldn't be detrimental to hobby workloads. anything more and there are very likely other issues at play, such as having your service connect to a database outside of railway's private network.

This is fair. But in our case, we use Railway services for our apps (because theyre awesome), but we HAVE to host the data in another service because of the region restriction. (i.e. we host the data in a DB in the EU). So if we could set one region for our apps, that would still be very helpful.

• Hobby plan users: able to deploy to Regions

• PRO users: Concurrent global deployments like fly.io and cockroach db style

• PRO users: should get additional usage included per user seat

richmeij, it's purely just a feeling, but it sounds like you might not be running hobby workloads on railway and should be on pro already?

seanknowles, Railway doesn't yet support concurrently deploying to multiple regions, this is planned and when it is available for pro there is a decent chance the hobby users will gain the ability to deploy into a singular region per account as the team has expressed interest in this path forward. I also agree that pro should come with usage, pro can get steep fast.

I would agree with others, that multiple regions should be a pro feature, but being able to select a single region should be part of the hobby plan I think.
I do not see how the only solution to choose a region should be going to "pro". "Hobby" plan has quite good resources to run a small business from it, so it does not make to pay triple if you only need a region switch.
Sure the performance hit is minimal, but it is still a performance hit that could be mitigated just use a closer region if your whole user base is for example in Europe.

If you're running a business with a user base on Railway, that's no longer a Hobby workload and you should very likely be on Pro, even if you don't necessarily need the increased resources or even regions.

This change is aligned with Railway's USP: Usage-based Pricing!

The plan names Dev, Hobby, and Pro have nothing to do with the type of usage. A business can run on the Hobby plan if it does not require more resources, and a hobby project may need the Pro plan resources.

If regions stay in the Pro plan and to be fair to everyone, customers should be assigned the farthest region by default and then should upgrade to switch to the nearest region (that is what it translates to currently, but only for non-US customers) :p

Brody, to be fair “hobby=no business, pro=business” sounds like something you would like to enforce as that’s how you imagined people should use the service. But not what product-market fit tells (judging by myself and this thread). In reality people do use hobby for business if resources are enough for them. Please don’t disregard businesses outside US, and don’t enforce x$ increase just to use such an essential feature nowadays mature services offer from the start.

People will start shifting to other providers. I am already utilising Fly.io an am happy so far.

harshjv, grundmanise, I'm sorry but that's entirely incorrect, it's not about if the resources on the Hobby plan are enough for your workload, If you run a part of your for-profit business on Railway that alone means you should be on Pro, regardless if you need 200MB or 20GB of memory. As the name suggests the Hobby plan is for hobby workloads.

[Double post by accident]

If you run a part of your for-profit business on Railway that alone means you should be on Pro

brody, is this official position/requirement of Railway?

I'm sorry but that's entirely incorrect, it's not about if the resources on the Hobby plan are enough for your workload, If you run a part of your for-profit business on Railway that alone means you should be on Pro, regardless if you need 200MB or 20GB of memory. As the name suggests the Hobby plan is for hobby workloads.

Can you please state your source?

OP (from Railway team) wants to offer Regions to Hobby users. So as a paying user, I’ll be happier and I’ll have more reasons to bring more projects to Railway.

If you run a part of your for-profit business on Railway that alone means you should be on Pro

brody, is this official position/requirement of Railway?

Yes, that's the goal behind the Pro plan, but it's not something we actively enforce (nor would it be feasible for us to).

The Hobby plan is intended for hobbyist use cases - side projects, indiehacking, "getting your feet wet before releasing", etc. Resources are one facet of what a tier entails; the other is feature set. We considered regions to be a feature for non-hobby use cases only, and thus we only released it for Pro users. You can run your business on hobby, but your expectation should be adjusted to that of what hobbyists would receive (fewer features, less resources, community-only support, etc.)

There are many good arguments in here on why regions should be enabled for hobby, and we'll likely start doing this once we support multi-region deploys for Pro.

i would love to switch basic services to railway, but the lack of EU hosting in Hobbyplan is a deal breaker for me.

We would appreciate if you could share your usecase for needing an EU region as a Hobby user.

In my case:

• GDPR

• Latency (website response, DB latency, ..)

In case of a (server rendered) website, imo the first impression matters to the user. It kinda sucks if the UI/Page load does not feel responsive and can be a factor over winning over the user, i tested my website between hobby and pro plan in EU and the difference is huge but the Pro plan is just overkill for what i really need and without users it will stay a side projects :D
Unfortunatley I'm considering moving the app to something else within europe

The ability to define a region for the entire account would be just perfect, if the EU region is more costly, i'm fine paying a little bit more for it and still be able to use railway for all my side projects!

BTW the pro plan states it is including everything from the hobby plan, but it does not include the 5$ ;( My Projects are running quite efficient and the usage is below it, having a one time 20$ payment for the pro plan + the 5$ of free usage/month would be also fine for me

Just my 2 cents, hope you can figure something out that benefits all sides, cheers

the 5$ per month with included usage does not justify choosing a region per service, or the planned multi-regions per service, otherwise they would already be on hobby, and in my opinion, choosing a single region and choosing multiple regions per service should very much a pro only thing as a little more latency would not affect hobby workloads significantly. instead what would likely happen (as it's been talked about, and mentioned above) is allowing hobby users to select a single region for the entire account.

what are the cost implications from railway side if they allow region selection per service even for hobby. fly.io doesn't charge for anything under $5, and allows multi region and scaling!!

saying hobby need downgraded service is never a good business move. I'll stick with fly for now

It really doesn't make sense to keep multi region locked up for enterprise, I'd be running more workloads as a pro user closer to my users which would net Railway more money at the end of the month as I would be doubling or trippling my compute and my spend.

If you want people to scale, and have flexibility on the legalities on data residency, you should give any size business hobby or not the ability to choose where they place their compute. You could limit other features but location limitations are rediculous espeically when you've got the private infrastructure to do it.

Koyeb will become competition for you soon, and all you need is for someone to build similar features on Fly.io and you've got a problem. Don't limit your customers, the less restrictions the more money you will make. I am thinking of moving my spend and infra projects somewhere else as I really don't like the restrictive mindset.

Open geographic region selection for customers, your customers are asking for it.

I also have services I would move over to Railway if I could use an EU region at the hobby tier.

It makes no sense at all that Regions are only on the Pro plan. How on earth is choosing a server nearest to your users a Pro feature? I'd argue it's the polar opposite and smaller companies probably only need to serve a single location closest to them.

It is fairly damaging to Railway's business because I spin something up on the Hobby plan, then users complain it is slow due to the 200ms roundtrip to US-East. So I drop Railway in favour of fly.io who don't charge a premium for server location... The comment from one of your employees higher up this thread that "Needing EU seems like a Pro use case" shows the utterly US-centric nature of Railway as a company right now. Please get some global employees and open up your global outlook.

I am not an employee and my opinions are my own, however I stand by that statement, if you have users you would likely already want to be on the Pro plan regardless of if you need a region other than us-west or not.

I am not an employee and my opinions are my own, however I stand by that statement, if you have users you would likely already want to be on the Pro plan regardless of if you need a region other than us-west or not.

If your project can run on the Hobby plan and you have users but still make less than $20 a month, you should be able to choose the plan that offers the best price and resources for your needs. Having to choose Pro plan once there are users seems like an artificial restriction.

It's not a hard requirement but as I have said a few times in this thread already, it's not about if your app can run within the Hobby resources, it's about usecase, for the most part if you have users and latency matters to that extent it sounds like a Pro usecase.

I'm not in agreement - nor are many others.Small projects take off and get users. Yes, we might upgrade to the Pro plan for other reasons but placing a $20 barrier to entry just to place your app near to you unless you are in the US is plain ridiculous to the rest of the world.

For hobby projects the little extra latency should not be an issue.

For hobby projects the little extra latency should not be an issue.

I agree with you if it's a free service. But Hobby users are Railway's paying customers.

Exactly - @brody as you aren't an employee it might be better for Railway to present a stance on this. Generally I'm not cool with a company who throttle users on principal for being on a lower tier, when it isn't actually a genuine technical limitation. Railway stands out against nearly all rivals in this practice. Again, I think the lower tier user is even more region sensitive than the higher... fly.io does it right by charging higher as you colocate or upspec your machines

You may see the response from a Railway employee above.

Looks like this may well come in the future based on that and we look forward to being able to use Railway more in Europe

Hey there Dan and everyone on this thread,We hear all of you and your feedback here. I wanna first address a few points before I dive in deep on the main point. Railway does have team members all across the world, especially in Europe. Railway, the company, and it's employees have gone through great lengths to ensure compliance with EU common market laws. I know that the same regulatory pressures we have, you have as well. And in 2022, Railway has a massive pain to use in EU. You and many others telling us that it sucked made us get off of the couch and get to work. I think I want to disinter-mediate two points that I am seeing here:1. The Pro plan is not worth it

2. Regions should be available to everyone

It's not lost on the Railway team that one of the main benefits of Hobby is that the $5 that you spend does go towards your usage. So it totally makes little to no sense that the seat cost doesn't map to to your spend. No promises, but we see that disjointness in the offering and we are looking into a way we can align incentives there. Today, we view the Hobby plan as a way to try Railway, get acquainted with the platform and then if they have a real world use-case, you can deploy on Pro. However, I, the Railway team, and the mods can tell you a million stories where a Hobby user who is hosting a mission critical application on Hobby runs into an outage because we provide no SLAs on that tier where it becomes a very awkward conversation. Compute on Railway is not unlimited and in this moment, we need to reserve boxes for business use-cases. If you need to comply with data residency laws, that is a business use-case and as such we need to prioritize them. (for now) The Pro offering is how we do that for compute, logs, and limits.We *know* that some other platforms have regions at the base tier. I am not telling you to move to them, but we don't control their offering. We took a very long time to ship regions because we wanted to build it in a way where you don't have to tear down your workload and reconfigure it in a separate sub like AWS/GCP/Azure. To Railway, Regions are a core primitive where you can move your workloads across zones, no questions asked. We think that is worth the value of the Pro plan + all the other features. Other platforms don't treat regions the way we do, and as such, it's not a complete apples to oranges comparison. (It's not lost on me that some of you don't want that, you just want EU as default, you are heard.)As the platform grows and as we rack more hardware, we will consider opening it up the same way our Clickhouse migration helped us extend the log retention limit for everyone. But, if it incurs a cost (GCP network pricing, hardware pricing etc.) unfortunately, we need to pass it on to users and meter that workload. Unlike other (usually VC) backed companies, we aren't handing out $2 for the cost of $1. The way we do business impacts yours, we have chosen sustainable growth so that we aren't in a forum thread having to apologize that we are raising prices by 3x or something. Unfortunately, this means we need to capture the value we offer via the Pro plan that way.I will still be in this thread in case you have more tomatoes to throw, I get where y'all are coming from.

Thank you for the thorough explanation and there are no tomatoes to throw - we all love Railway, that's why we're here taking the time to post.I do hope you bring Regions to hobby notwithstanding the challenges clearly outlined. There's something in it that if you cannot even spin up a region nearby in Hobby mode to kick the tyres, it is less likely that you will convert those potential users to Pro users in the same region when their business needs grow. You've demonstrated a good understanding of where we are coming from, though clearly we may have a wait ahead.

fly.io it is then <3

Unsure if srs, but even if so, I want what's best for your use-case. In the meantime, we will constantly strive to do better. 🙇‍♂️

Anyone reading this thread, do try Coolify (https://coolify.io/) by Andras (https://x.com/heyandras). It's open source and does 99% of things that Railway does without any limitations.

coolify.io <3

??

Who is writing? I'm receiving notifications...

Ah I see you harshjv, Also heard about it, for now I'll host on psaas, but I'll stick with render until here I can try it in my region, maybe I'll try coolify that's looking promising

Sorry folks, there was a cache issue with this thread. Messages should show up correctly now

First, I would like to say that I do like Railway, and if not for this issue I would've used it. Also, I would like to thank Railway's employees for being transparent about Railway's decision; those things are exceptionally rare these days

But I would like to say this: I think it's simply insane to regard a paying user, even if it's just $5, as someone who is trying Railway. I mean, that's simply what the Free Trial is for, isn't it? This is the first time I've seen this distinction; Microsoft, Google, Amazon all have 12 month free trials because of this, and every other services have a free tier specifically to "try" their services (at least, services I've tried). I would expect small businesses to be able to run on the Hobby plan, just like Render's free plan, Github/Gitlab free, etc. And you know what? They are completely free.

Notwithstanding the above, one of the things that users would like to try is latency, no? I would like to test the latency of your Singapore servers, and yet I can't do exactly that, and you're saying that I need to pay you $20 + compute, just to try this out? I hope you realize how crazy that sounds.

I also have a problem with statements like these:

• We *know* that some other platforms have regions at the base tier. I am not telling you to move to them, but we don't control their offering

• Other platforms don't treat regions the way we do, and as such, it's not a complete apples to oranges comparison

To me, these sound evasive. It sounds like you're trying to blame other services for having this feature, and sure, "it's not a complete apples to oranges comparison", but your closest competitor, Fly.io, champions themselves in this multi-region deploy capability, and thus in Fly.io you "can move your workloads across zones, no questions asked" in their PAYG/Hobby plan, so...

Nevertheless, I appreciate Railway's response. if I need to wait for this feature, I'll wait - until it's too late. Until then, I'll not be your customer. I wish you good luck for your company.

Regarding to GDPR (EU regulations) European citizens personal data should be physically stored in EU. Then Hobby plan US hosting could be killer for many EU projects

Finally have an update for y'all -

We just racked our own servers and US-West is now open for business for Hobby. We'll be opening up more Railway Metal regions for US-East and EU-West in the coming months. Finally glad that we are able to address this long standing issue with our product offering y'all were facing.

Finally have an update for y'all -

We just racked our own servers and US-West is now open for business for Hobby. We'll be opening up more Railway Metal regions for US-East and EU-West in the coming months. Finally glad that we are able to address this long standing issue with our product offering y'all were facing.

Yay! Looking forward to eu-west being available

Finally have an update for y'all -

We just racked our own servers and US-West is now open for business for Hobby. We'll be opening up more Railway Metal regions for US-East and EU-West in the coming months. Finally glad that we are able to address this long standing issue with our product offering y'all were facing.

does Southeast Asia (singapore) region coming to the hobby plan too ?

Yep!

All regions currently supported by GCP will also be supported by metal, and all Hobby users will be able to deploy to all metal regions!

That's some great news

great!

We are thrilled to announce that Railway Metal is now available in GA for the all-new EU-West service region !

Something to note -

- Metal regions don't support volumes yet, so if your service is relying on a service with a volume (a Database) it would be best to keep everything in US-West GCP for now.

Hi,
I lived in CA in USA. Do you recommend that I switched to California metal? I am using the US west now

If your service does not connect to another service with a volume, yes you should deploy to metal!

Considering this one shipped after we got Railway Metal out. Enjoy!