Terms of Service: Only non-commercial use allowed?
obstkompost
PROOP

2 years ago

Hello all!
The terms of Service (https://railway.app/legal/terms) says under 4. What are the basics of using Railway?
"You will only use the Services for your own internal, personal, non-commercial use, and not on behalf of or for the benefit of any third party, and only in a manner that complies with all laws that apply to you."
Does that mean i can host here only hobby projects and nothing business (commercial) related?

Thank you for your time.

50 Replies

Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

^^^ Bump


adam
MODERATOR

2 years ago

Yes, those TOS apply to users on the hobby plan. Users on the Pro plan are able to use Railway for commercial purposes


obstkompost
PROOP

2 years ago

Thank you for the Response!
How do I know that the TOS only applies to the Hobby Plan? I couldn't find the restriction on the Hobby plan. And then where is the TOS for the Pro plan then?


adam
MODERATOR

2 years ago

Im not sure, i’ll tag in the team on this one. Those are the restrictions on hobby vs pro plan though.


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Now that hobby plan "no longer" offers free credits, is there any reason for non-commercial usage?


jeremybarbet
PRO

2 years ago

These terms are from 2021. Hobby and Pro plans didn’t exist at that time.

Not sure if your statement is valid then. Unless it was already the case for Starter vs Team plans, if that was the plans back in 2021


adam
MODERATOR

2 years ago

Yeah looks like the TOS hasn’t updated. The team has their reasons for not allowing commercial usage on the hobby plan. The cost of commercial rights on any platform is generally higher than the cost of “hobby” usage


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Lol good find


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Can we get some feedback on this?


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

"You will only use the Services for your own internal, personal, non-commercial use, and not on behalf of or for the benefit of any third party, and only in a manner that complies with all laws that apply to you."


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

That means third party aka client you cannot recommend railway services or use it on behalf of your client?


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

And you can only use it for personal non commerical use? As stated in terms of service?


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Oh, For pricing, I generally find Railway expensive. I assume the team plan allows it, which is only $35-40/month more.

I'm currently renting a 1 core + 2GB of RAM, and that only cost me $6/month. If I were to max out similar specs on railway, that would be up to $40.

ofc, the price is justified with the service its provided, but still, I wouldn't really say it's "cheap".


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

My interpretation is that you can only run services for your own purpose (i.e. def not for your client) while not making any profit off of it.


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

That's shared metal machine? No auto scaling, auto sleeping or any similar stuff?


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Correct, ~$6 flat monthly cost VPS with 40 GB of storage and no ingress/egress limit.

Technically I'm paying ~$4 since I signed up with long-term contract + holiday discount, but that would be the base cost.


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

That's pretty decent although GCP does give you $300 credit and their cloud run service has app sleeping you can also limit how much an app can scale


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

So trying same thing on railway to see how much app sleeping improves the cost over renting shared machine


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

With app sleeping cost is basically non existant imo


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

I'm not too sure why, but I haven't seen my app sleep. Though it is idling most of the time, so cost isn't an issue. I also notice that using Dockerfile significantly cut down the RAM usage (200 to around 70)


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Yeah docker is great especially because you can migrate to any server within minutes


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Weird, my outbound is pretty much flat for longer than 10 minutes. Is the CPU/RAM usage suppose to go 0 when sleeping?


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

pretty much flat is not "no packets" lol


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

RAM is always gonna be active, you should see 0 CPU


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

ram is not always going to be active


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

imo we shouldn't pay for ram if service is sleeping and not being used


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Never seen ram at 0


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

sleeping apps use zero ram and zero cpu, regardless of what the metrics say


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Oh right "Private Networking does not currently work with App Sleeping", that makes sense.


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

when apps are put to sleep they are sent sigterm and are fully stopped


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

your app can still sleep if you have the private network enabled, what that sentence means is that you cant wake a service up from within the private network, you have to call its public domain to wake it


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

ah, my network graph is showing 0 bytes throughout this whole time. Is there anyway to detect what packet is going out?


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

nope


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Does it not make sense to always use public route and block others with CORS?


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Since you cant wake service on internal network


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Can database sleep? Is that a thing?


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

not always, depends on the use case


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

yes


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

I feel like you shouldn't sleep the database since you'll most likely using internal net to communicate (and avoid the extra egress cost).


brody
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

this is true, if you use the private network to communicate with the database (you should be) then you dont want app sleeping on the database


Anonymous
TRIAL

2 years ago

Makes sense


ray-chen
EMPLOYEE

2 years ago

cc <@1062946248291786772> for eyes on the ToS bit


You can use the Services for your own internal, personal, and/or business use


We are preparing to update Railway's Terms of Service, which will include language to make this clearer. Updated terms will ship next month.


obstkompost
PROOP

2 years ago

Thank you for the response!


obstkompost
PROOP

2 years ago

Thats nice to hear👍


obstkompost
PROOP

2 years ago

Hello all!
can we open this Question again or should i create a new thread?
I am asking because the Railway's Terms of Service is still not updated and commercial-Use is still not allowed accourding to the Terms of Service.

Also this Thead about "User Submission" :
https://discord.com/channels/713503345364697088/1006629907067064482/threads/1176136452057333821
is still not resolved.

I really like the services of railway, so i hope that the ToS gets soon a update.


Hi there. The new ToS, along with updated privacy policy and DPA, are finalized and include the two clarifications above. We’re currently waiting for a government approval before we can push the updates. You’ll receive an email notifying when we update the terms.


obstkompost
PROOP

2 years ago

Happy to hear that! Thanks for the response👍


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