Railway Killed Their Free Tier a Year Ago. Everyone Still Recommends It. Here's What Actually Works in 2026.

Description and use

Railway discontinued its free tier in 2025, yet many dev resources still recommend it. The author tested four platforms and found that Cloudflare Workers + Hyperdrive + Neon can host an Express + Postgres API for free, while Oracle Cloud Always Free serves persistent workloads. Migration saved $7.23/month and stopped cost growth.

Problem

Railway removed its free $5 credit tier in August 2025, yet many dev resources still recommend it, leading to unexpected costs and misaligned expectations for free hosting.

Outcome

Migrated 30‑day Express + Postgres API to Cloudflare Workers + Neon for $0, achieving 40k requests with no cold starts. Persistent services run on Oracle Always Free VM for $0, avoiding the $5/month minimum of Railway.

Workflow

• Deploy Express + Postgres API to Cloudflare Workers using Hyperdrive for connection pooling.
• Create a Neon database; it scales to zero when idle.
• Configure Worker to connect to Neon via Hyperdrive connection string.
• Deploy with npx wrangler deploy (≈8 s).
• For persistent services, launch an Oracle Cloud Always Free VM (4 ARM cores, 24 GB RAM).
• Run long‑lived processes (e.g., Uptime Kuma, n8n, Tabby, Postgres backup) on the Oracle VM.
• Monitor CPU usage to avoid instance reclamation (keep >15% utilization).

Evidence

Railway removed their $5 free credit tier in August 2025.

Source

Cloudflare Workers + Hyperdrive: 100k req/day, truly free; Neon: 0.5GB, scale-to-zero; Oracle Cloud Always Free: 4 ARM cores + 24GB RAM, forever.

Source

30 days, ~40k requests, zero dollars. My Railway bill before migrating: $7.23/month and climbing.

Source