Can you use Railway's free plan or trial for a commercial or client site?

Yes for your own business. Railway's Terms of Service, effective April 20, 2026, allow “your own internal, personal, and/or business use, and not on behalf of or for the benefit of any third party.” For a client's site, Railway's pricing FAQs say: “Create a Pro plan on Railway and add the client to the workspace.” The Terms' sentence names no plan, so it holds on the free trial, the Free plan, and every paid plan alike.

Money, not the terms, is what stops a business site on free. Railway's free trial gives “a one-time grant of $5” for up to 30 days. “After 30 days passes or $5 is spent, the free trial reverts to the Free plan, which provides $1 of free credit per month.” Railway's pricing page lists custom domains on Free as “1 trial, then 0,” so after the trial a free site has only a Railway address. Railway's Pro plan costs $20 a month, and that $20 is also usage credit.

As of October 29, 2026, 08:55 JST (October 28, 23:55 UTC). Railway's Terms of Service show an effective date of April 20, 2026. Its Acceptable Use Policy, pricing page, and docs show no date of their own, so each fact on this page is from the version read on October 29. Prices are Railway's, in US dollars. Terms change, so check them before you launch.

If you're here because of Railway's October 2026 security incident, the steps for the keys you stored there are in Railway security incident, October 2026: what to do now. This page covers Railway's free trial, Free plan, and paid plans: what each one allows, what happens when the credit runs out, and which plan a business or a client project needs.

What Railway's terms say about business use

3 documents decide it, and none of them limits free accounts to personal or non-commercial use.

• The Terms of Service allow business use and rule out third parties. “You will only use the Services for your own internal, personal, and/or business use, and not on behalf of or for the benefit of any third party.” A store, a SaaS app, or your company's site is your own business use. Railway doesn't say whether a site you build for a client counts as use “on behalf of” that client; for client work, it points to a Pro workspace with the client in it.
• The Acceptable Use Policy bars resale. It lists “reselling compute resources” and “evading usage or billing limits” as “abuse of the platform,” beside cryptocurrency mining and torrenting. It ends: “If you are unsure whether your use case is allowed, ask us before deploying.”
• The docs recommend Pro for anything commercial. Railway's pricing FAQs say: “If you are supporting a commercial application, we highly recommend you to upgrade to the Pro plan for higher resource limits and access to priority support.” It's a recommendation, with reasons given, not a rule in the Terms.

The plan names point the same way. Railway's plans docs describe Hobby as “For indie hackers and developers to build and deploy personal projects” and Pro as “For professional developers and their teams shipping to production.” Neither the Terms nor the Acceptable Use Policy turns those descriptions into a rule, so Railway doesn't say a Hobby or Free account can't run a business. That's unlike Vercel Hobby, whose rule is “non-commercial personal use only” (Can you use Vercel's Hobby plan for a commercial site?).

2 clauses of the Terms apply on every plan, free included:

• Free credit ends free use. “Once all Usage Credits have been exhausted, you must upgrade to a Paid Service in your account settings to continue to use the Services.”
• Railway can stop or change the service. “Railway is also free to terminate (or suspend access to) your use of the Services or your account for any reason in our discretion.” Railway may also “impose limits on certain features or restrict access to parts or all of the Services.”

What the free trial and the Free plan give you

Railway has 2 free stages. The trial comes first, and the Free plan takes over when it ends. The figures are from Railway's pricing page, free trial docs, and plans docs.

The trial has 2 versions. If Railway verifies your GitHub account, you get the Full Trial. If you don't connect GitHub, or Railway can't verify it, you get the Limited Trial, where “your services will have restricted outbound network access and only a limited set of ports will be available.” Railway says “This is a fully automated process, and Railway does not respond to requests for verification.”

Railway's docs don't say what “$1 of free credit” runs. At the rates in its plans docs, RAM costs “$10 / GB / month” and CPU “$20 / vCPU / month.” By this page's arithmetic from those rates, $1 pays for about 100 MB of RAM held for a full month, before any CPU or traffic. A service using the Free plan's full 0.5 GB of RAM all month would use $5 of RAM, 5 times the credit.

What happens when the credit runs out

• On the trial, the trial ends when 30 days pass or $5 is spent, whichever comes first, and the account moves to Railway's Free plan, with its $1 of credit a month.
• Railway stops the services. Its pricing FAQs list “Trial credits exhausted” among the reasons services are stopped, with the fix “Consider upgrading to a paid plan to continue using the service.” The Terms say the same for all free credit: “you must upgrade to a Paid Service … to continue to use the Services.”
• Railway redeploys if you fix it within 30 days. “Railway will automatically redeploy your services once the underlying issue is resolved, as long as it is resolved within a period of 30 days.” After that, you redeploy them by hand.
• Trial data is deleted 30 days later. “Railway deletes stateful volumes created by Trial accounts 30 days after the expiration of your credits.” The plans docs give the same 30 days for the Free plan, “after sufficient warning.”

Railway doesn't say whether a Free-plan service that used up its $1 in the middle of a month starts again by itself when the next month's $1 arrives. For a site your customers rely on, a free service that stops partway through the month is the risk to plan for.

Case by case: what fits on Railway's free trial or Free plan

The rulings apply Railway's Terms, Acceptable Use Policy, pricing page, and docs, as read on October 29, 2026, to the sites people ask about. Where Railway's pages don't cover a case, the last column says so.

What to pay for, and when

Railway bills a subscription plus usage, and the subscription counts toward usage. Its plans docs say “The Hobby plan includes $5 of resource usage per month,” and give the example: “If your resource usage is $7, your total bill for the cycle will be $7 ($5 subscription fee + $2 of usage).” Pro works the same way at $20.

Prices and limits are from Railway's pricing page, and the domain counts per service from its domains docs.

So the first paid step for your own business is Hobby, which adds your own domain. Railway doesn't say a commercial app can't run on Hobby, but it recommends Pro for one. For a client, Railway's route is a Pro workspace with the client added, so the client can take over the project later. Railway also waives the Hobby fee “for a small set of active builders,” decided automatically, and it “does not respond to requests for waiver.”

Other hosts, on the same questions

The other hosts' rows come from their pages on convika.com, whose sources were read on October 23 and 24, 2026. Follow each link for the quotes and the sources.

Free hosting for a business site rules the same cases at GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare Pages.

If the part a client's customers see first is a landing page, it doesn't need a Railway service. Convika hosts landing pages, one HTML page each, with a form that keeps entries and stats on who visited, and section 7 of its terms lets freelancers and agencies build pages for their clients, host them on Convika, and charge for that work, on the Free plan too. Convika doesn't run backend code or host a database, so an app's API and its data stay on Railway's Pro plan or another host.

Frequently asked questions

Is Railway free?

Yes, to start. A new account gets a 30-day free trial with “a one-time grant of $5” and no credit card. After 30 days, or once the $5 is spent, the account moves to the Free plan, which gives “$1 of free credit per month” that doesn't roll over. Railway's cheapest paid plan, Hobby, is $5 a month.

Can I use Railway's free plan for a commercial project?

Yes, as far as Railway's terms go. The Terms of Service, effective April 20, 2026, allow “your own internal, personal, and/or business use” and set no separate rule for free accounts. The Free plan's $1 of monthly credit and its lack of a custom domain are what make it a poor fit for a business site, and Railway's docs “highly recommend” Pro for a commercial application.

Can I host a client's website on my Railway account?

Railway's Terms don't name client sites, but they allow use only for yourself and “not on behalf of or for the benefit of any third party.” Railway's pricing FAQs answer freelancers and agencies with one route: “Create a Pro plan on Railway and add the client to the workspace.” Pro starts at $20 a month, and that $20 is also usage credit. If you're unsure about your setup, Railway's Acceptable Use Policy says to “ask us before deploying.”

What happens when Railway's free trial ends?

Your account moves to the Free plan. “After 30 days passes or $5 is spent, the free trial reverts to the Free plan, which provides $1 of free credit per month.” The Free plan's limits are lower: 1 project, 3 services, 0.5 GB of RAM per service, no custom domain, and no cron jobs. Railway deletes volumes created on the trial 30 days after the credits expire, unless you upgrade.

What happens when my Railway credits run out?

Railway stops your services. Railway's pricing FAQs list “Trial credits exhausted” as a reason services are stopped, and the Terms say that once free credit is used, “you must upgrade to a Paid Service … to continue to use the Services.” Railway redeploys the services by itself if you fix the cause within 30 days. Railway doesn't say whether a Free-plan service restarts on its own when the next month's $1 arrives.

Can I use a custom domain on Railway's free plan?

No, not after the trial. Railway's pricing page lists custom domains on Free as “1 trial, then 0.” The trial allows 1 custom domain, so not both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. Hobby allows 2 per service and Pro 20 per service.

Is Railway's Hobby plan free?

No. Railway's plans docs say “The Hobby Plan is $5 a month, and it includes a resource usage credit of $5. Even if you do not use the $5 in usage (CPU, Memory, egress), you always pay the $5 subscription fee.” Railway waives the fee for “a small set of active builders,” chosen automatically.

Can I use Railway's Hobby plan for a business?

Yes. Neither the Terms nor the Acceptable Use Policy limits Hobby to non-commercial use, though Railway describes Hobby as being “For hobbyist developers building side projects.” For a commercial application, Railway's docs “highly recommend” Pro, for “higher resource limits and access to priority support.” For client work, Railway points to Pro.

Does Railway's free plan sleep when nobody visits?

No, not by itself, as far as Railway's docs say. The only sleep they describe is Serverless, a setting “When Serverless is enabled for a service,” which puts a service to sleep after 5 to 10 minutes without outbound traffic. The first request after that wakes it, and “may return a 502 Bad Gateway response.” Sleeping uses less of the $1 credit.

Does Railway delete my data on the free plan?

Yes, after your credits expire. “Railway deletes stateful volumes created by Trial accounts 30 days after the expiration of your credits,” and Railway's plans docs give the same 30 days for the Free plan, “after sufficient warning.” Hobby keeps volume data 60 days after cancellation, and Pro 90 days.

Sources

Each source was read on October 29, 2026, between 08:53 and 08:56 JST. Dates in parentheses are the document's own.

• Railway Terms of Service (effective date 2026-04-20)
• Railway Acceptable Use Policy (no date on the page; railway.com/legal/fair-use redirects here)
• Railway pricing (no date on the page)
• Railway docs: Free trial (no date on the page)
• Railway docs: Plans (no date on the page)
• Railway docs: Pricing FAQs (no date on the page)
• Railway docs: Cost control (no date on the page)
• Railway docs: Serverless (no date on the page)
• Railway docs: Working with domains (no date on the page)