I thought that Railway was free. I still have 5usd in credit doesn't that count?

The $5 worth of credits cannot be used to subscribe to a plan for the first month.

The Free plan provides you with $1 per month to host services on Railway. However, as mentioned above, Free plan users cannot disable serverless, which can lead to slow response times from a cold start.

I have checked and my serverless is off by default.

You must be on the trial then.

Does this slow response time happen locally?

my front end is on Vercel and my backend on Railway, when I load my website it loads quickly but the product take about a minute to load after which I have to keep on refreshing the page, without this the products take another minute to load. I don't know what the issue is

how can I troubleshoot the issue

You should be hosting both your frontend and backend on one platform (eg, either Vercel or Railway instead of both) to minimize response times.

I have made them to be in the same region US West on both

Are you loading images? If so, open Devtools and go to the Networking tab to measure how long each route takes to load, as well as response size.

how ill that help me address this because it seems more like a cold start issue? If I keep the page refreshed it does not load as much