Direct answer
For a service you want to leave running, Render has the more useful free tier: a 512 MB free web service with 750 free instance-hours per workspace per month, plus a free Postgres and Key Value instance. Railway’s free plan is different in kind — it gives you $1/month in usage credits, which is enough for a few days of a small service, so it works better as a trial than as a home.
The catch on both is the same: nothing here is free and always-on. Render sleeps idle services; Railway stops them when the credit runs out.
The headline numbers (verified 2026-10-14)
| Railway (Free plan) | Render (Free) | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $0 | $0 |
| What you get | $1/month in usage credits | 750 free instance-hours/workspace |
| Per-service ceiling | 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM | 512 MB RAM (0.1 CPU) |
| Idle behaviour | Service stops when credits are gone | Spins down after 15 min; ~1 min to wake |
| Custom domain | No (0 domains) | Yes, + managed TLS |
| Projects / services | 1 project, 3 services | Up to 25 services (Hobby workspace) |
| Database | Postgres/Redis from the same credit pool | Free Postgres (256 MB, expires in 30 days) + Key Value (25 MB) |
| Log history | 3 days | Log streams |
| Step-up price | $5/month (Hobby) | $7/month (0.5 CPU / 512 MB) |
Railway also keeps a separate one-time $5 Free Trial (30 days, up to 2 vCPU / 1 GB per service, 2 replicas, 1 custom domain). That trial and the ongoing Free plan are different things — don’t confuse the $5 trial with a recurring $5/month.
What Railway’s free plan actually buys
Railway bills by the second for CPU and memory. Its published usage rates are roughly $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB-month, with volumes at ~$0.15/GB-month and egress at $0.05/GB (official rates).
Do the arithmetic on a $1/month credit: a 0.5 GB service alone costs about $5/month of memory, so $1 covers roughly six days of memory for the smallest allowed service — and that’s before CPU. A lighter container that idles most of the day stretches further, because stopped services cost nothing. In practice Railway’s Free plan is a burst allowance: fine for a demo you show on Friday, not for a bot that has to answer at 3 a.m.
The Free plan’s platform limits bite too: 1 project, 3 services, 1 replica, 3-day logs, and zero custom domains (Railway pricing). No custom domain is the sharpest limitation — a real project needs one.
What Render’s free plan actually buys
Render’s free tier is capped by instance-hours, not dollars. You get 750 free instance-hours per workspace per calendar month, and a spun-down service does not consume them. Since a month is ~730 hours, that is just enough to keep one free web service running continuously — and while it idles it spins down anyway, which stops the clock.
Concretely, a Render free web service is 512 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU, spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic, and takes about a minute to wake (Render free docs). Custom domains and managed TLS work on free web services, and you can run up to 25 services on the $0 Hobby workspace (5 GB bandwidth included).
The database side is where Render’s free tier needs care: free Postgres has 256 MB RAM and 1 GB storage but expires 30 days after creation (Render Postgres). Free Key Value is 25 MB RAM. Neither is a place for data you need next month — plan to upgrade the database or store state elsewhere.
Which one to pick
- A service you want to stay reachable → Render. 750 hours + free custom domains + a free database is the closest thing to a persistent free PaaS.
- A quick Docker/Node deploy you’ll tear down → Railway. Great DX and per-second billing; the $1/month credit is a stopwatch, not a home.
- A static site → both are free, but neither is a reason to choose the platform. Render static sites don’t sleep; Railway charges static hosting against the same credit pool.
- You need more free compute than either offers → look at Google Cloud Run (2M requests/month, scale-to-zero) before paying.
The honest warning
Both platforms have “free” plans whose real limit is time, not features. Render eliminates that with instance-hours but expires your free database; Railway removes the sleeping but makes you pay per second from a $1 pool. If your app must respond instantly 24/7, budget $5–7/month — Hobby on Railway, or the $7 compute plan on Render. For side projects, demos, and low-traffic APIs, both free tiers are genuinely usable as long as you don’t store anything precious in a free database.
Railway and Render figures verified against official pricing and documentation on 2026-10-14 — see the live compute comparison and our data registry.