Railway vs Hetzner for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Railway Overview

Railway is a managed platform that handles the infrastructure so you don't have to. Push your code, Railway builds it, deploys it, and keeps it running. Need a database? Click to add Postgres or Redis. Need environment variables? Set them in the dashboard and they're injected into your service. The visual canvas showing your services and their connections is genuinely useful for understanding your stack.

I reach for Railway when I want something running fast without infrastructure work. A Django backend with Postgres and Redis deploys in under 10 minutes. The usage-based pricing keeps costs low for small projects. And the developer experience, from the dashboard to the CLI to the deploy logs, is polished.

Railway's usage-based model means a small backend running 24/7 costs roughly $5-10/month. Add Postgres and you're looking at $7-12/month total. Reasonable, but it adds up as you add more services.

Hetzner Overview

Hetzner is where you go when you want the most server for the least money. Their VPS pricing is legendary in the developer community. A CX22 server with 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD, and 20TB bandwidth costs EUR 3.99/month as of the April 2026 pricing. The same specs on AWS would cost several times more. The hardware is solid, the network is fast, and the uptime has been reliable in my experience.

I run production services on Hetzner and the value is hard to argue with. For less than the price of a Railway backend, you get an entire server that can run your frontend, backend, database, Redis, and a monitoring stack all at once. The catch is that you're setting everything up yourself.

Hetzner is bare infrastructure. You get a Linux VM with an IP address. Everything else, from Docker to Nginx to SSL to deploy pipelines, is your responsibility. If you enjoy that kind of work, it's satisfying. If you don't, it's a time sink.

By the Numbers (2026)

Here is the verified picture as of late May 2026, pulled from each vendor's own pricing pages and the public package registries.

Railway

• Hobby plan is $5/month and includes $5 of resource usage credit. You pay the $5 even if you use none of it, and only the overage above $5 once you cross it. The Pro plan is $20/month per seat with $20 of usage credit included.
• Compute is billed per second at $20 per vCPU per month and $10 per GB of RAM per month.
• Network egress is $0.05 per GB. Volume storage is $0.15 per GB per month.
• The Railway CLI (@railway/cli) sits at version 4.65.0 and pulled 182,479 npm downloads in the week of 2026-05-21 to 2026-05-27, which is a reasonable proxy for how actively the platform is being deployed to.

Hetzner Cloud

• The CX22 shared-vCPU plan gives you 2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk, and 20 TB of traffic for EUR 3.99 per month in the Germany and Finland locations (effective with the April 1 2026 price adjustment, up from EUR 2.99). Every plan, including this entry tier, includes 20 TB of traffic and 1 IPv4 address.
• Stepping up, CX32 is 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB disk; CX42 is 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 160 GB disk; CX52 is 16 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, 320 GB disk, all with the same 20 TB traffic allowance.
• US locations (Ashburn and Hillsboro) run roughly a euro higher and ship with a smaller included-traffic allowance than the EU regions, so confirm current pricing for your chosen region before you commit.

The deploy layer on top of Hetzner

Because Hetzner is bare infrastructure, most solo devs add a deployment helper. The two most adopted open-source options:

• Coolify, a self-hosted Heroku-style PaaS, has 56,151 GitHub stars and 4,666 forks, with its latest release v4.1.1 published 2026-05-27.
• Kamal, Basecamp's container-deploy tool, has 14,249 GitHub stars and 715 forks. Its latest release is v2.11.0 (published 2026-03-18), and the kamal gem has been downloaded 18,908,557 times in total on RubyGems.

Both are free and open source, so they change the comparison from "managed convenience versus raw server" into "managed convenience versus a server plus an hour of setup."

Real Cost at Solo-Dev Scale

Let me run an actual workload through both pricing models so the cost gap is concrete instead of hand-waved.

Assumptions. A single solo-dev side project that needs a web backend, a Postgres database, and a small Redis instance, running 24/7. Call it 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM for the app, plus a database and Redis that together use about another 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM. So roughly 2 vCPU and 2 GB RAM of steady usage, with light egress, say 20 GB per month.

Railway. At $20 per vCPU per month and $10 per GB RAM per month, 2 vCPU plus 2 GB RAM is $40 plus $20, which is $60 of compute per month if those resources ran pinned at full allocation. Real usage-based billing meters actual consumption per second, so a lightly loaded hobby app rarely pins its full allocation and the real bill commonly lands lower, but the ceiling for this shape of workload is the $5 plan fee plus that metered compute plus $0.05 per GB egress (20 GB is $1.00). The point stands: the moment you run a couple of always-on services with real allocation, you are well past the $5 included credit and into double-digit monthly territory.

Hetzner. The same web app, Postgres, and Redis all fit comfortably on one CX22 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk). That is EUR 3.99 per month, all in, with 20 TB of traffic included, so your 20 GB of egress costs nothing extra. One flat sub-five-euro charge runs the entire stack.

The takeaway. For a single always-on multi-service project, Hetzner's flat EUR 3.99 versus Railway's metered compute that scales with each running service is the whole story. Railway wins on the zero-setup minutes; Hetzner wins on the monthly invoice. The crossover is your own hourly rate. If the few hours of one-time Hetzner setup (or twenty minutes wiring up Coolify) is worth more to you than the recurring difference, stay on Railway. If you are running this for months and watching the bill, the math favors Hetzner hard, and it only widens as you add a second and third project onto the same box.

Key Differences

Managed vs manual. Railway manages your infrastructure completely. Deploys, networking, service health, and scaling are handled for you. Hetzner gives you a server and nothing else. You install the OS, configure the firewall, set up the web server, manage SSL, and build your own deployment process. The gap in operational overhead is significant.

Cost efficiency. This is where Hetzner shines. For EUR 3.99/month you get a CX22 with resources that, run as separate always-on services on Railway at $20/vCPU and $10/GB-RAM, climb well into the double digits monthly. A Hetzner VPS with 4GB RAM can run multiple services simultaneously. On Railway, each service consumes its own resources and generates its own cost. For multi-service stacks, the cost difference is dramatic.

Time investment. Railway saves you hours of setup time. A new project goes from zero to production in minutes. Hetzner's initial setup takes hours, including server hardening, Docker configuration, SSL, and deploy automation. After the initial setup, ongoing maintenance still takes time. Security updates, monitoring, and troubleshooting are your responsibility.

Multi-project hosting. On Railway, each project has isolated resources and its own bill. On Hetzner, you can run 5-10 small projects on a single VPS. For solo developers with multiple side projects, Hetzner is significantly cheaper because you consolidate everything on one machine.

Reliability and uptime. Railway handles failover, health checks, and zero-downtime deploys automatically. On Hetzner, if your VPS goes down, your services go down until you fix them. You can set up monitoring and alerting, but the responsibility is yours. Railway's managed reliability is worth something, especially for projects with users depending on uptime.

Scaling. Railway can scale your services by adjusting resource limits in the dashboard. Hetzner requires you to resize the VPS (which involves brief downtime) or set up a more complex architecture with multiple servers. Railway's scaling is more convenient. Hetzner's scaling requires more planning.

Location and latency. Hetzner has data centers in Germany, Finland, and the US (Ashburn). Railway runs on GCP infrastructure with more region options. If your users are primarily in the US, Railway offers better regional coverage. If your users are in Europe, Hetzner's network is fast and well-connected.

When to Choose Railway

• You want to deploy fast without managing servers
• Your time is more valuable than the cost difference
• You need a quick staging environment or prototype
• Managed infrastructure, deploys, and health checks matter to you
• You're building a single project, not hosting a portfolio of side projects

When to Choose Hetzner

• You want maximum performance and storage per dollar spent
• You're comfortable with Linux server administration
• You're hosting multiple projects and want to consolidate costs
• 20TB bandwidth included matters for your traffic levels
• You want full control over your infrastructure and security

The Verdict

This comes down to what you value more. Time or money.

Railway saves time. You deploy in minutes, never manage a server, and pay a premium for the convenience. For solo developers in the early stages of a project who need to validate an idea quickly, Railway's speed is worth the higher cost.

Hetzner saves money. You spend time upfront setting up infrastructure, but the ongoing cost is a fraction of managed platforms. For solo developers with established projects who want to optimize costs, moving to Hetzner makes financial sense.

A pattern I see often in the solo developer community: start on Railway for speed, then migrate to Hetzner when costs start mattering. Railway for prototyping and validation. Hetzner for production when you know the project has legs. That's a pragmatic approach that uses each platform where it excels.

If you go the Hetzner route, pair it with Coolify or Kamal to get a deployment experience closer to Railway's. Both are free and open source and heavily adopted, with Coolify at 56.1k GitHub stars and Kamal at 14.2k. You won't match Railway's polish, but you'll get Git-based deploys and a dashboard on top of Hetzner's excellent hardware value.

Sources

All figures verified on 2026-05-29.

• Railway pricing page: https://railway.com/pricing
• Railway pricing plans documentation (per-vCPU, per-GB-RAM, egress, volume rates, Hobby and Pro plan fees and credits): https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans
• Railway CLI version and weekly npm downloads (@railway/cli 4.65.0; 182,479 downloads, week of 2026-05-21 to 2026-05-27): https://registry.npmjs.org/@railway/cli/latest and https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-week/@railway/cli
• Hetzner April 1 2026 price adjustment (CX22 EUR 3.99/mo in DE/FI, up from EUR 2.99): https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/
• Hetzner new CX cloud server plans (CX22, CX32, CX42, CX52 specs and 20 TB included traffic): https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/new-cx-plans/
• Hetzner Cloud regular-performance plans page (shared-vCPU specs): https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/regular-performance
• Coolify GitHub repository (56,151 stars, 4,666 forks, latest release v4.1.1 on 2026-05-27): https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
• Kamal GitHub repository (14,249 stars, 715 forks, latest release v2.11.0 on 2026-03-18): https://github.com/basecamp/kamal
• Kamal gem total downloads (18,908,557) and version 2.11.0 on RubyGems: https://rubygems.org/gems/kamal