Railway.
PaaS for indie and AI builders — Heroku's spiritual successor at modern prices.
What it is.
Railway is a platform-as-a-service that takes a GitHub repository and runs it in production. the founder founded the company in 2020 after Heroku stopped shipping. The product targets builders who want a working URL fifteen minutes after the commit lands, without writing Terraform or learning Kubernetes. The 2025 AI-builder wave moved tens of thousands of Bolt and Lovable projects onto Railway.
Where it fits.
Solo developers, small teams, and AI-builder users who need hosting that just works. Particularly strong as the deployment target for projects scaffolded by Lovable, Bolt, and v0. Railway charges by the second across CPU, memory, and network — pricing that wins against AWS for any workload under steady scale.
- Heroku-grade developer experience at modern prices
- One-click Postgres, Redis, MongoDB provisioning
- Most popular host for projects shipped via AI builders
- Vertical scaling limits versus AWS or GCP at very high load
- Smaller compliance footprint than hyperscalers
Frequently asked.
Railway or Vercel?
Vercel for Next.js front-ends and edge functions. Railway for full-stack apps with databases, background workers, and long-running services.
Can Railway handle production workloads?
Yes. Hundreds of YC startups run production on Railway. The platform supports horizontal autoscaling, replicas, and zero-downtime deploys.
Does Railway support GPU workloads?
Not directly. Pair Railway with Modal or Replicate when the workload needs GPU inference — Railway hosts the API, the GPU service handles the model.
