Compare Railway and Render free tiers side by side. Pricing, limits, change history, and risk assessment for developers.

Railway vs Render

Side-by-side free tier comparison. Catalogue dates here run to 2026-08-17.

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Verdict

Both Railway and Render offer free tiers. Railway provides "Free" while Render offers "Hobby".

A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn, a product retired — does not lapse with time. A badge carrying a date states the record it rests on; a badge with no date rests on no record in force.

Railway

Riskstable
CategoryCloud Hosting
TierFree
Verified2026-08-17
Last read2026-09-18
Changes2 recorded
Free $0 per month. Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 per month. Up to 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per service. 0.5 GB of volume storage. 2 replicas during the free trial, then 1. Projects: 5 during trial, then 1
🔗 Referral link: $20 in Railway credits (disclosure)

Render

CategoryCloud Hosting
TierHobby
Verified2026-08-15
Last read2026-09-16
Changes1 recorded
Hobby plan, $0 a month plus compute. Free web services (512 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU) spin down after 15 minutes without traffic, with 750 free instance hours per workspace a month. One free Postgres database (256 MB RAM, 1 GB storage, 30-day expiry) and one free Key Value instance (25 MB, not continuously persisted to disk) per workspace. 5 GB bandwidth/month included then $0.15/GB; without a payment method on file, Render suspends Free services for the rest of the month instead. 500 build minutes/month. Up to 25 services, unlimited projects with 2 environments each. Pro is $25 a month plus compute.

Pricing Change History

Railway

new effective 2025-09-03 medium impact
Railway added a Free plan: after the 30-day trial, $1 of free credit a month. It first appears in the Internet Archive's 2025-09-03 capture; the 2025-08-24 capture has no Free plan. Source ↗
reduced effective 2025-06-30 medium impact
Railway's trial credit now expires. The one-time $5 grant, which previously did not expire, lasts 30 days. The Internet Archive's 2025-06-26 capture still says the credits do not expire; the 2025-06-30 capture says they expire in 30 days. Source ↗

Render

restructured effective 2026-04-23 high impact
Render replaced its workspace plans. Bandwidth for the Hobby tier went from 100 GB to 5 GB included per month, then $0.15 per GB, and Hobby workspaces are now capped at 25 services. New workspaces got the new plans on 2026-04-23 and existing workspaces moved on 2026-08-01. Free web services, Postgres and Key Value kept their specs, and free web services draw on the workspace's included bandwidth. Source ↗

Watch Both Vendors for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Railway curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Railway curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Render curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Render

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