Disclosure: This page uses my Railway referral link. If you sign up with it, you get $20 in Railway credits and I earn a commission if you later become a paying customer. The terms below come from Railway’s own docs and pricing page, checked September 28, 2026.
Railway referral code: 9pKdVg
Sign up for Railway with the referral link ($20 in credits) →
What the referral gets you
- New accounts get $20 in Railway credits. Railway describes it as the equivalent of a free month on the Pro plan.
- The credit is applied through the link. Sign up from the link above and the code is attached automatically. You don’t type it in anywhere.
- It’s for new Railway accounts. If you already have an account, the referral doesn’t apply.
On my side, Railway pays the referrer 15% of the new customer’s invoices for their first 12 months. It only pays if you become a paying customer, so there’s no incentive for me to oversell it. If Railway isn’t a fit, the comparison pages linked below cover the alternatives.
Railway pricing (September 2026)
| Plan | Monthly minimum | Usage included | Main limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 one-time trial credit for 30 days, then $1/month | 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB RAM per service, 1 project, 0.5 GB volume |
| Hobby | $5 | $5 of usage | 48 vCPU / 48 GB RAM per service, 50 projects, 5 GB volume |
| Pro | $20 | $20 of usage | 1,000 vCPU / 1 TB RAM per service, 100 projects, 1 TB volume |
| Enterprise | Custom | Varies | HIPAA BAAs, SSO, dedicated VMs |
Usage rates on top of what’s included:
- Memory: $0.00000386 per GB per second (about $10 per GB-month)
- CPU: $0.00000772 per vCPU per second (about $20 per vCPU-month)
- Volume storage: $0.00000006 per GB per second (about $0.16 per GB-month)
- Egress: $0.05 per GB
The monthly figures are my arithmetic from Railway’s per-second rates, assuming a 30-day month and a service running the whole time. Real apps rarely use their full allocation, so most small projects cost less.
How far does $20 in credits go?
Some rough examples using the rates above:
- A small API or bot using ~0.25 GB of RAM and a sliver of CPU: a few dollars a month. $20 covers several months of this on top of the Hobby plan’s included $5.
- A web app plus a small Postgres database, each around 0.5 GB of RAM: roughly $10–15 a month depending on CPU use. $20 covers about a month or two.
- Anything with steady high CPU: each full vCPU is about $20 a month, so the credit goes fast. Check the usage page in the first week.
The fastest way to know is to deploy, then look at Railway’s usage dashboard after a day and multiply.
Who Railway is a good fit for
Good fit:
- Side projects, prototypes and small SaaS backends
- Apps that need a database, cron jobs or a background worker next to the web service
- Bots and workers that need to run 24/7 (which serverless platforms handle poorly)
- Anyone who wants to deploy from a GitHub repo or a Dockerfile without managing a server
Look elsewhere if:
- You only have a static site or a frontend. Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages have free tiers that fit better. See Vercel vs Netlify.
- You need the cheapest possible always-on compute and are comfortable running Linux yourself. A small VPS is cheaper per GB of RAM.
- You want to compare free tiers and startup credits across providers first. See our free developer credits and perks list.
FAQ
What is the Railway referral code?
9pKdVg. Use the referral link so it’s applied automatically at sign-up.
How much is the Railway referral bonus? $20 in Railway credits for new accounts, per Railway’s affiliate program docs and referrals page as of September 2026.
Can I add a referral code to an existing Railway account? Railway’s docs describe the credit as applying to new sign-ups through a referral link. Existing accounts don’t qualify.
Does Railway have a free plan? Yes. New accounts get a one-time $5 trial credit for 30 days, then the Free plan includes $1 of usage a month with small per-service limits. The referral credit is on top of that.
Is Railway cheaper than Render or Heroku? It depends on the workload. Railway bills by the second for what you actually use, while Render and Heroku mostly bill by instance size. Small or bursty apps often come out cheaper on Railway; large, steady workloads can be cheaper on fixed instances.
Sources, checked September 28, 2026: Railway pricing, Railway affiliate program docs, Railway free trial docs.