Our take
Pick Railway if app 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. Pick Val Town if solo JS developers who will stay on Free at $0 (100k runs/day, public vals, 15-minute
Best for
Railway A service you start at $0 / $1
Val Town HTTP / cron / email code you start at $0
Free plan
Railway No free plan
Val Town $0 · unlimited public vals. 100,000 runs/day. 15 min cron. 1 min wall-clock / run. 3 days log retention. Email yourself. MCP. No custom domains
Lowest paid
Railway Usage (services) $0.00000386
Val Town Pro $21/mo yearly
Next step up
Railway Sandboxes $0.00001929
Val Town Business from $167/mo yearly
Coding agent
Railway Sandboxes
Val Town
Runs where
Railway Local; you host it
Val Town Hosted
Watch out
Railway Free becomes $1/month after the 30-day $5-credit trial
Val Town Free vals are public
Last checked
Railway 2026-10-22 · railway.com/pricing
Val Town 2026-10-23 · val.town/pricing
app 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 pagesolo JS developers who will stay on Free at $0 (100k runs/day, public vals, 15-minute cron) while they ship a first HTTP val, then buy Pro at $21/month billed yearly when they need private vals, 1-minute cron, and 1M runs/day.
Read the Val Town page