Railway - Deploy Shit Without AWS Hell

I've deployed 30+ projects on Railway over the past two years. Here's what actually matters if you're tired of AWS bills that make no sense and Heroku's death by a thousand cuts.

Railway takes your Git repo and gets it running online without you becoming a DevOps expert. No bullshit, no 47 different services to configure. You connect GitHub, Railway figures out what you built, and boom - it's live.

The visual canvas thing is actually useful, unlike most drag-and-drop interfaces. You can see your services talking to each other, which saved my ass when debugging why my frontend couldn't reach my API at 3am last week.

The Real Value Proposition

After getting fucked by AWS bills one too many times (seriously, who charges for NAT gateways?), Railway's pay-per-use model is refreshing. My side project that costs me $60/month on Heroku runs for $8/month on Railway. Same app, same traffic, 85% cost reduction.

Railway launched in 2020 and got decent funding because we're all tired of cloud complexity hell. They built what we actually need: deploy code, get a URL, pay for what you use.

How It Actually Works

Railway's build system tries to detect what you built - Node.js, Python, Go, whatever. About 90% of the time it gets it right. The other 10%, you write a Dockerfile like you would anywhere else. Last month I had a React app that kept failing builds because Railway couldn't figure out my custom webpack config. Took me 3 hours to realize I just needed to add a simple Dockerfile.

Deployments happen when you push to main. Takes 2-3 minutes for most apps. If something breaks, you can rollback in literally one click. I've done this at 2am more times than I care to admit - like when I accidentally pushed code that broke environment variables and took down my side project for 20 minutes.

When Railway Works Great

Railway shines for typical web apps: React frontend + Node.js API + PostgreSQL database. The kind of stack 80% of us actually build. They handle the database setup, backups, connection strings - all the shit you don't want to think about.

I've shipped everything from simple CRUD apps to multi-service systems on Railway. The platform handles routing between services automatically, which beats the hell out of configuring load balancers. My biggest win was a client project with 5 microservices that took me 3 days to deploy on Railway versus the 3 weeks it would've taken to set up properly on AWS.

For teams that don't have dedicated DevOps people (most startups), Railway eliminates weeks of AWS setup time. You can go from idea to deployed app in a day instead of wrestling with IAM policies. Their templates let you deploy popular stacks instantly, though I've found the Next.js template works better than doing it from scratch.

Railway Architecture Overview: Railway runs each service in its own container and handles the networking automatically. No load balancer configuration hell like AWS. Databases are managed separately and everything just talks to each other without you having to set up service discovery bullshit.

The Pricing Actually Works

Railway's pricing calculator saves me real money. That Twitter thread about $80 to $3 monthly isn't bullshit - I've seen similar reductions on multiple projects. My biggest cost reduction was a Next.js app with PostgreSQL that was costing $150/month on Heroku and now runs for $25/month on Railway.

The $10/GB RAM pricing means you pay for actual usage, not reserved capacity. My blog API uses 200MB RAM most of the time, spikes to 1GB during traffic bursts, and I pay maybe $3/month instead of Heroku's $25 dyno sitting idle 90% of the time. Check out Railway's resource usage monitoring to track your spending.

Gotcha: The database can sneak up on you cost-wise. That "small" PostgreSQL instance hit $50/month when I imported real data and forgot about connection pooling. Monitor your usage through the Railway dashboard.

Build System Reality Check

The build system works great until it shits the bed. Simple Node.js apps deploy without thinking about it. When I tried to deploy a Next.js app with custom webpack config, it took 3 hours of debugging build errors that didn't happen locally.

Railway moved from Nixpacks to "Railpack" but honestly, the difference doesn't matter for most apps. It detects your package.json, runs npm install, and starts your app. When it breaks, you write a Dockerfile like everywhere else.

Real build times: 2-4 minutes for most apps, not the "under 2 minutes" marketing claims. My largest React app takes 6 minutes because of the webpack build, but that's not Railway's fault. Use Railway's caching to speed up subsequent builds.

Database Integration Is Actually Good

The managed databases are legitimately useful. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis - they provision in 30 seconds and handle backups automatically. Connection strings get injected as environment variables so your app just works.

I've run production PostgreSQL on Railway for 18 months without issues. The automatic backups saved my ass when I accidentally dropped a table (don't ask). One-click restore, 5 minutes downtime, lesson learned.

Warning: Connection pooling isn't enabled by default. You'll hit connection limits around 100 concurrent users without it. Enable it in the database settings or you'll get "too many connections" errors at the worst possible time.

When Railway Breaks

Railway is reliable but not bulletproof. I've had deployments fail with cryptic error messages that resolved by trying again 10 minutes later. The platform is growing fast, and growing pains show occasionally. Check Railway's status page for real-time platform health.

Worst outage I hit was 3 hours when their European region died. My US-deployed services kept running fine. Unlike AWS, Railway's status page actually tells you what's broken instead of "degraded performance in us-east-1."

Support reality: Discord is hit or miss. Sometimes you get instant help from their team, sometimes your message gets buried in general chat. For production apps, you want the Pro plan's priority support. Also check Railway's documentation and Central Station for official support tickets.

What Railway Gets Right

Railway nails the 80% use case: deploy a web app with a database without becoming a DevOps expert. The visual canvas is genuinely helpful for understanding service connections, especially when debugging API communication failures.

The auto-scaling works well for traffic spikes. My side project got featured on Hacker News and Railway scaled it automatically while I was asleep. Woke up to 50,000 visitors and a $12 bill instead of a crashed server.

Environment management is better than Heroku's. You can promote changes from staging to production with confidence, and rolling back is instant when shit hits the fan at 3am. Their PR deployments feature automatically deploys pull requests for testing.