Hey!

Nextjs server route handlers are intended for serverless runtimes, but you can run them on a "serverful" runtimes (like Railway) without any penalties whatsoever in most cases (unless you're relying on edge/cdn cache from Vercel etc.)

A standalone hono/bun server gives you better separation of concerns (no frontend-intermingling-with-backend) and it's scalable on its own. I'd personally recommend this over Next but this is more of a general architecture decision you have to make for your own setup.

Got it. Yeah I was mostly curious. I'm early enough I can go either route. but thinking on this more you can scale backends easier. so sticking to as is.