A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I discovered Railway, and my experience using this alternative to Heroku. I was impressed with Railway. I still am. In this short time I have used Railway, it has been very reliable, speed was decent, and I didn't have any issues with it. I was starting to think that Railway could become next Heroku. It has almost all the feature of the Heroku and some are even better. More importantly Railway offered free credits. As you may already know Heroku has stopped its free tier plans about a year ago. I thought Railway would replace Heroku for students, hobbyists, and developers as a platform to experiment, prototype, and learn by deploying real world apps.
Railway has announced that they will be discontinuing their monthly recurring $5 credits, and restructuring their plans. When I started using Railway they were offering starter, developer, and team plans. None of them had fixed monthly fees, but rather they kept track of execution time and charge based usage. Starter plan (free) would provide $5 credit which would renew every month. In other words, the services were free to use as long as the computing costs don't exceed $5, which is more than enough for experimenting and prototyping ideas. This would be enough for personal projects as well. Most personal use apps don't require continuous computing power. This $5 credit was also available for Developer plan as well. Developer tier would require some payment methods entered and would be charged only if the usage would exceed $5 free credit, but would ensure there are no interruptions for active apps.
Their new plan structure will be Trial, Hobby, and Pro. Starter plans becomes Trial, Developer plan becomes Hobby, and Teams becomes Pro. Unlike Heroku, they are not completely removing free tier plan. Instead they have chosen to keep one time $5 credits available for those wish to try the services before deciding to pay. I think it is a smart move. Completely removing free tier wouldn't be beneficial for them either, as Railway is a newer platform and has been around for about two years. Although there is no longer recurring $5 credit, new users can still benefit from initial $5 credit and this should be plenty to experiment with Railway and find out it is a good fit for their apps and projects. If users choose to continue using Railway, they can simply sign up for Hobby plan which will cost $5 a month.
But they also say that as a bonus, $5 subscription fee will be waived for verified users. It is not clear if this would be waived for every month, they will only waive the first month's fee. At this time is sounds like verified accounts in developer tier won't need to pay monthly $5 fee but only pay based on usage. Hopefully they will add some clarification regarding this in the future. Regardless, $5 a month seems more than reasonable for a reliable service. I am sure I will continue using the service. What I am not sure is if I would run multiple apps on Railway. I may have to only use it for the ones I really need on daily basis. The database project I was recently working on will definitely continue running on Railway.
The main reason they decided to change structure of plans and remove recurring monthly $5 credits is to fight abuse. Apparently, they have been experiencing similar issues Heroku had before they removed the free tier. Torrent bots, and mining operations were taking advantage of Railway's generous free computing offer and running multiple accounts to runs various bots for free. When there is free offers, especially for computing power, there will always be some who figure out ways to take advantage of the system, and the initial intent of free offers may become difficult to achieve. I can see how Railway as a startup would try to offer free plans to attract more developers, especially new developers to their platform. It is a win win model. The platform wins by growing its user-base, and these new users eventually become paying customers. At the same time students and new coders get the experiment and improve their skills without worrying about the costs of cloud computing.
Abuse of their free service also became a time consuming matter that would distract the company from building better service. It is unfortunate that their free credits didn't last for a while, but I agree with their reasoning and changes to improve their platform. I am glad they still are offering free trial, and this might be good enough for most people. If I haven't already tried Railway, I probably wouldn't have paid for service without know what would be the experience. I have had great experience using Heroku, but my experience running apps on Render wasn't great. Just based on this paying for a new service I haven't heard about before would be a gamble. It may turn out good, or become waste of time and money. Free trial solve this issue and give an opportunity for new users to discover better tools.
Another reason for changing plans they explain as the confusion among users. After using Heroku, I also was confusing about their current plans. Since there was no fixed fees, I wasn't sure what to expect. Would I be overcharged at some point? I had no clue. My solution was to monitor the usage and decide based on that. Having fixed fees helps a little bit. While the plans have fixed subscription fees, there is also possibility that users will be charged more based on the usage. They are going to charge network egress at $0.10 / GB. However for most users this should be negligible. Everybody's situation would differ, and users would need to monitor their projects and usage to get a better idea.
These changes will be launched on July 3, 2023 and existing users will be migrated to new plans on August 1, 2023. Those who have been on starter plans will be moved to trial plans, those who have been using developer plan will be move to Hobby, and Teams will move to Pro. Hopefully these changes will help Railway grow and scale. I do wish success for Railway, and will continue to be a user. It is always great to have multiple options and tools when working different projects. I won't be abandoning Heroku as well. But I do hope to explore more solutions I haven' tried yet. Let me know your thoughts in the comments
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Thank you for this, I also looking for an alternative to Heroku. This seems worth to try!
$WINE
Cheers~
Just curious, why don't you just build your own cloud? Sounds like a lot of work, but it's really not. There's a lot of free software out there that will give you what you are looking for with minimal work. I have to wonder how long these services that offer free hosting will last as the internet itself becomes more prevalent and affordable. The only reason I see for hosting like this anymore is virtualization and weighted loadbalancing, but is that necessary? I know many businesses with hundreds of thousands of daily users that operate out of NYC and hosting in Virginia (that's it - no virtualization). These businesses operate just fine. No offense, but your daily users probably aren't as comparable. Why not just get an internet plan that isn't capped and run it all from home? The benefit will be that you will be able to invest more into it and yield returns that pay dividends instead of having to reduce costs. Just a thought.
Fly.io still has a good free plan, but I think you will find most of these will discontinue free plans eventually. Especially as others do, they get the pressure. Like when Heroku discontinued theirs, Fly.io got hammered.
I was wondering yesterday what Fly.io was after seeing cryptic mention of it in Railway's blog post.
I knew Bender was Render, but couldn't figure out what they meant with Guy.io.
I will try Fly.io as well. Thank you!
It sucks to hear that the abuse got to them and they disabled it for people. The bad actors are making it bad for anyone involved but I think they are a great service if the bots are willing to go that far. I hope Railway continues to be profitable because releasing good updates would only be good news for anyone using the services.
I was indeed happy for you when you found Railway to replace Heroku. I was almost hurt to find out their free trial had to be reshuffled but reading further to see that they did so to curb abuse made me feel better.
I thought you wouldn't want to use them again. But I am glad you already had the opportunity to experiment with Railway enough to make up your mind to pay the $5 for the plan you are planning to utilize. I am glad, the free plan still exists for new users to experiment with before they decide to pay for the service.
But now, they won't get the same experience you had to experiment long enough to make a paying decision. It's all good because the company has to make sure abuse has been curtailed and everyone is getting value out of their service. Thank you for sharing.
The way people see it now is that technology has advanced so much and the way you've talked about it so much better that if it's done, it's more convenient for people to travel.
I remember you made a post about it too sometimes ago, if Railway want to add a pay to there service and preexisting one, so far it's still in a considerable good price range, it's OK.
One good side of Railway is that you can build your app from the templates that is already built on Railway.
With the demand railway is wanted by people, even increasing the pay wouldn't stop people from using it
There are somethings you can't do anything about, if you need to travel through railways, you need to follower the rules and terms set by them.
At first, when you began to talk about Railway, I was think that it was the railway transportation. Hahaha
It is good that you have discovered it
#hive #posh
My thoughts on Hive and how it has devolved, and why I'm quitting after being here from day 1.