Railway vs Fly.io in 2026: pricing, infrastructure, and platform comparison

Railway and Fly.io are both platforms for deploying applications without managing servers directly. This article compares their compute models, pricing, databases, networking, and developer workflows as they stand in 2026.

• Railway combines a flat monthly subscription with usage-based billing: the subscription (Free $0, Hobby $5/month, Pro $20/month) counts toward your resource usage, with any excess billed per minute at $10/GB RAM/month and $20/vCPU/month.
• Fly.io is pay-as-you-go: Fly Machines are billed per second while started, based on a CPU/RAM preset. Stopped Machines are billed only for root filesystem storage at $0.15/GB per 30 days, though attached volumes continue to be billed separately.
• Railway deploys from a code repository (with or without a Dockerfile, building an OCI-compliant image) or a Docker image from Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, GitLab Container Registry, or Microsoft Container Registry.
• Fly.io is operated primarily through flyctl, its CLI, and provides a fully-managed Prometheus-compatible metrics service with managed Grafana dashboards.
• Teams evaluating either platform for production often look at bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) support to avoid vendor lock-in, running databases alongside application services under one billing model, and uptime guarantees. Railway reserves isolated infrastructure for Enterprise customers but it's not a BYOC platform, and Fly.io doesn't offer a BYOC option. Northflank is built around these points, with BYOC available as a self-serve option alongside its managed cloud, and the section below shows how it compares on each.

Railway is a cloud platform that deploys applications, databases, and workers from a code repository or a Docker image, building OCI-compliant images when no Dockerfile is provided, with support for both public and private container registries.

Fly.io runs application code on Fly Machines, lightweight virtual machines available in shared and performance CPU types, deployed from a Dockerfile or a prebuilt image and managed primarily through flyctl, the Fly.io CLI. Fly.io also provides Managed Postgres as a separate product and Fly Volumes for persistent storage.

The two platforms differ most in how compute is billed, how databases and storage are handled, and how the developer workflow is structured.

Railway combines a flat monthly subscription with usage-based billing. The subscription (Free $0, Hobby $5/month, Pro $20/month, Enterprise custom) counts toward your resource usage. Usage above the subscription is billed by the minute at $10/GB RAM/month, $20/vCPU/month, $0.05/GB egress, and $0.15/GB/month volume storage.

Fly.io is pay-as-you-go with no base subscription. Started Fly Machines are billed per second based on their CPU/RAM preset (shared-cpu-1x with 1GB RAM ≈ $5.70/month continuous); stopped Machines are billed only for rootfs storage at $0.15/GB per 30 days.

Railway lets you deploy databases such as Postgres, MySQL, and Redis as services inside a project, alongside your application.

Fly.io Managed Postgres lives outside your apps, so deleting an app doesn't delete its database. It's a fully-managed service with automatic backups, high availability with failover, and encryption at rest and in transit, with pgvector and PostGIS support. Plans range from $38/month (Basic) to $1,922/month (Performance), with storage at $0.28/GB for a 30-day month.

Fly Volumes cost $0.15/GB/month, pro-rated to the hour, and are billed whether attached or not, including when the Machine is stopped. Snapshots cost $0.08/GB/month with 10GB free monthly and 5-day retention by default.

Each Fly.io app gets a shared IPv4 and unlimited Anycast IPv6 by default. Dedicated IPv4 costs $2/month, static egress IPs cost ~$3.60/month, and data transfer is tiered by region group from $0.02/GB (North America/Europe) to $0.12/GB (Africa/India). Managed SSL via Let's Encrypt costs $0.10/month per single-hostname cert (first 10 free) or $1/month for wildcard.

Railway's resource pricing lists network egress at $0.05/GB for services, with object storage egress free.

Fly.io is operated primarily through flyctl, covering app creation, deployment, Machine and volume management, secrets, logs, and networking. Fly.io also provides Prometheus-compatible metrics (built on VictoriaMetrics) with managed Grafana dashboards, queryable via MetricsQL, a PromQL-compatible language; remote read isn't supported.

Railway provides variable and secrets management, CLI/API orchestration, and built-in observability tooling for tracking deployments.

Northflank provides managed databases, built-in CI/CD, workers, cron jobs, and preview environments within a single control plane. It supports GPU workloads and deployment to managed cloud, bring-your-own-cloud, or a customer's VPC across AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, CoreWeave, and Civo, as well as on-prem and bare-metal clusters. Northflank is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant.

Compared to Railway, Northflank adds bring-your-own-cloud and customer VPC deployment as documented, self-serve options alongside its managed cloud. Compared to Fly.io, databases run as services within the same project and billing model as your application, rather than as a separate product billed independently from your apps.

Get started with Northflank (self-serve), or book a demo if you have specific infrastructure requirements.

See related articles:

• Railway vs Heroku in 2026: a comparison of Railway and Heroku covering pricing, infrastructure, and databases
• Railway alternatives: platforms covering persistent services, databases, and workers
• Fly.io alternatives: options for teams evaluating platforms beyond Fly.io
• Is Railway good for production workloads?: a closer look at Railway's reliability track record

It depends on traffic patterns. Railway bills usage by the minute at $10/GB RAM/month and $20/vCPU/month, with the subscription acting as included credit. Fly.io bills started Machines by the second for the full time they're running regardless of traffic, so a low-utilization Machine left running can cost more relative to its actual usage. Teams comparing usage-based pricing may also want to model Northflank, which bills compute at $0.01667/vCPU/hour and $0.00833/GB/hour to the second, with a free Sandbox tier including always-on compute, two services, a database, and two cron jobs.

Both offer managed Postgres, but the model differs. Railway runs databases as services inside the same project as your app. Fly.io Managed Postgres is a separate product billed by plan plus $0.28/GB storage per 30-day month; deleting an app doesn't delete its Managed Postgres cluster. Teams that want databases running alongside app services under a single billing model can also compare Northflank, where databases are deployed as addons within the same project as your services.

Fly.io charges started Machines based on their CPU/RAM preset for the entire time they remain started, regardless of whether they're processing requests. To avoid idle compute charges, a Machine must be explicitly stopped, after which billing switches to rootfs storage only at $0.15/GB per 30 days. Teams that want compute billed to the second based on actual usage can also compare Northflank's pay-as-you-go pricing.