tport.cloud vs Railway: what an always-on server really costs

Railway is a lovely way to ship an app: push, and it runs. The bill is the part people find out about later. Railway charges by the second for the CPU and memory a service uses, so a toy project costs almost nothing, and a busy app that keeps its cores and RAM busy all month costs what that much cloud costs at usage rates. We priced both from Railway's pricing page on 30 October 2026 and put them next to a plain server you rent by size.

Short version: an always-on box with 8 vCPU and 24 GB of RAM, fully used, is about $445 a month on Railway before traffic and $19 a month on tport.cloud with traffic included. That is not a typo, and the rest of this article shows the arithmetic.

What Railway charges

Railway has a $5 Hobby plan and a $20 Pro plan. The plan fee counts toward your usage, and usage is billed per second on top:

Hobby includes $5 of usage a month and caps a service at 48 vCPU / 48 GB; Pro includes $20 and goes much higher. The free plan gives $1 a month for a 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB service.

An always-on server, fully used

Railway only bills what a service actually uses, so an idle app costs less than the numbers below. But if you would otherwise rent a server of a given size, the fair comparison is that size running all month, which is what a server costs anywhere. Here are three common sizes and our closest plan:

Each of our plans in that table is bigger than the Railway box it sits next to, and costs between a twelfth and a twenty-third of it. Traffic is on top at Railway: 1 TB out is another $51.20. On tport.cloud traffic is included in the monthly price.

What about a light app?

Most apps are not pinned at 100% all month, and that is where Railway's model is kind. Take an app averaging a quarter of a vCPU and 1 GB of RAM, a PostgreSQL service at 0.1 vCPU and 0.5 GB, 130 GB of volumes and 1 TB of traffic: $5 + $10 + $2 + $5 + $19.50 + $51.20, about $93 a month on Pro after the $20 credit is used up. Traffic is the biggest single line. The same app fits comfortably on our $7.50 server (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 100 GB) with the database on the same box, or on a $10 one with 200 GB if the volumes grow.

What you give up, honestly

Railway builds and deploys from git, scales replicas and gives each service its own metrics, and you never log in to a machine. A tport.cloud server is an Ubuntu 24.04 machine: you get SSH, root (or a locked-down no-root mode), and the installs you tick at order time (Python, Node, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Caddy and more) set up for you. You deploy the way you like, with git, Docker or a script. If you want a platform rather than a server, that is a real difference. If you mostly wanted a box that is always on, it is a lot of money for convenience.

Our vCPUs are shared, as Railway's are; the numbers above compare like with like on size, not on dedicated cores.

Sources

Railway: railway.com/pricing, plans and per-second usage prices, checked 30 October 2026. Railway figures assume 730 hours a month and full use of the CPU and memory shown. tport.cloud: tport.cloud/pricing. Our prices are the Germany prices from the pricing page; other regions cost a little more and the order form shows the exact price before you pay.