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

说明与用途

Railway 在 2025 年取消了免费套餐，但许多开发资源仍在推荐它。作者测试了四个平台，发现 Cloudflare Workers + Hyperdrive + Neon 可以免费托管 Express + Postgres API，而 Oracle Cloud Always Free 适用于持久性工作负载。迁移后每月节省 7.23 美元，停止了成本增长。

问题

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.

结果

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.

工作流

• 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).

证据

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

来源

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

来源

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

来源