Our take
Pick Northflank if app teams who will stay on Sandbox at $0 (2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database, $20 of Cloud resources, no seat fee) while they ship a first project canvas, then move to Pay as you go when they need unlimited services and horizontal scale — billed from $0.01667/vCPU-hour on Northflank Cloud. Pick Railway if app teams who will stay on Free $0 during the 30-day $5-credit trial (then $1/month, 1 project, 3
usage-metered deploy desk
usage-metered deploy desk
Best for
Northflank Workloads you start at $0
Railway A service you start at $0 / $1
Free plan
Northflank $0 · no card. 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database. Up to $20/month of resources on Northflank Cloud. 1 BYOC cluster, up to 12 vCPU / 48 GB (your cloud still bills that infra). Always on, no sleeping. 2 projects. Best-effort support
Railway No free plan
Lowest paid
Northflank Printed compute plans $12
Railway Usage (services) $0.00000386
Next step up
Northflank
Railway Sandboxes $0.00001929
Coding agent
Northflank
Railway Sandboxes
Runs where
Northflank Local; you host it
Railway Local; you host it
Watch out
Northflank Sandbox is 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 addon, and $20 of Cloud resources
Railway Free becomes $1/month after the 30-day $5-credit trial
Last checked
Northflank 2026-10-23 · northflank.com/pricing
Railway 2026-10-22 · railway.com/pricing
app teams who will stay on Sandbox at $0 (2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database, $20 of Cloud resources, no seat fee) while they ship a first project canvas, then move to Pay as you go when they need unlimited services and horizontal scale — billed from $0.01667/vCPU-hour on Northflank Cloud.
Read the Northflank pageapp teams who will stay on Free $0 during the 30-day $5-credit trial (then $1/month, 1 project, 3 services) while they ship a first GitHub service, then land on Hobby at $5 minimum / month when they need 50 projects and 48 vCPU — or Pro at $20 minimum when they need 100 projects and 30-day logs.
Read the Railway page