7 months ago
Hey everyone! 👋
I'm about to launch a small SaaS and I'm currently evaluating Railway for hosting both the backend + frontend and database in production.
I really like the developer experience so far, but I have a couple of concerns:
How expensive can Railway get in production, especially with always-on services and growing traffic?
I've seen some videos and demos where API response times are over 2-3 seconds for a simple response. — is this something you've experienced in production?
If you're using Railway in production (especially for a SaaS), I’d love to hear your honest feedback — both pros and cons.
Thanks a lot 🙏
7 Replies
7 months ago
It completely depends on the number of services you're running as well as the languages/frameworks. There is a calculator on the pricing page you can use to estimate costs assuming a constant load. There is also an "estimated cost" figure that is calculated for your billing period based on the amount of resources your services have used historically. This is only accurate after your apps have been live for 24-48 hours
Nope! Though I'm relatively close to the US East region, where Railway defaults my deployments to. The demos you're referencing may be outdated from before Railway rolled out its Regions feature
7 months ago
There are European regions!
1) As with any other hyperscaler: Yes, if you make a grave configuration or programming mistake or if you're targeted by a DDOS attack, Railway can bankrupt you on egress and memory costs. You can set a hard spend limit. This is nothing new and not unique to Railway.
2) No, that is not a regular occurrence. Railway is as fast as any other platform. However, their new "metal" infrastructure still has quirks and problems.
Example: A few weeks ago my services suddenly ran into a 100x - 500x increase in response times. Cause? Disk I/O issues. I had to move the project from EU-West to US-East. These kinds of errors should become less prevalent over time as they gain more experience operating the datacenters.
Be aware that Railway will perform unannounced forced redeployments of your services from time to time. This includes databases, taking them offline for some unknowable amount of time.
So far, Railway has proven itself to be less predatory and more pro-customer in their conduct than their competitors.
Example: With metal infrastructure, Railway went against the current cuntish industry trend of billing "per-seat" (like Vercel does for example), opting for product competition instead.