Koyeb vs Railway
Koyeb is cheaper across every workload modelled here.
List prices checked
Rate cards side by side
Only the axes at least one of them bills on. A dash means that provider does not charge for it.
| Billing axis | Koyeb | Railway | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | $6.40/mo | $5.00/mo | 1.3× Railway |
| Data transfer out | $0.030/GB | $0.050/GB | 1.7× Koyeb |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes | — |
Source: Koyeb pricing (May 2026) · Railway pricing (May 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.
Monthly cost for three real workloads
The rate cards applied to identical usage. This is where the winner changes.
| Workload | Koyeb | Railway | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Side projectA personal site or small app with modest traffic, a few gigabytes of assets, and one small always-on process. | $9.40 | $10 | Koyebsaves $0.60/mo (6%) |
| Growing SaaSA funded product serving a few thousand daily users, with an image-heavy frontend and two application servers. | $36 | $55 | Koyebsaves $19/mo (34%) |
| Media-heavy siteA publisher or video product where delivery dominates the bill and compute is almost an afterthought. | $306 | $505 | Koyebsaves $199/mo (39%) |
Workload definitions are identical on every comparison page, so figures here can be read against any other pair in the same category.
What each one is for
Koyeb
by Koyeb
Deploys containers globally with scale-to-zero and per-second billing, aimed at teams that want edge distribution without managing a Kubernetes cluster.
Free tier: One free instance with limited resources
Railway
by Railway
Bills per second of actual CPU and memory consumption rather than per provisioned instance, which makes irregular and low-traffic workloads markedly cheaper than flat-rate platforms.
Free tier: $5 of usage included on the Hobby plan
Common questions
- Is Koyeb or Railway cheaper in 2026?
- Koyeb is cheaper in all 3 modelled workloads.
- What is the difference in egress cost between Koyeb and Railway?
- Koyeb charges $0.030 per GB against Railway's $0.050, roughly 1.7× cheaper. Egress usually dominates the bill once traffic is measured in terabytes.
- Which has the better free tier, Koyeb or Railway?
- Both publish one. Koyeb: One free instance with limited resources. Railway: $5 of usage included on the Hobby plan.
- What do these estimates not include?
- Committed-use and reserved discounts, regional price variation, per-request API charges, support plans, and minimum retention periods. All of those move real invoices, sometimes by a lot. These figures compare published list prices for the same workload, which is the comparison the rate cards alone cannot give you.