A Railway alternative with a bill you can predict
Railway is a lovely place to ship a container, but its meter never stops running: RAM and CPU are billed as you go by the minute, in USD, and egress is metered on top. Ruust flips that model. You pick an Egg size, you pay one flat price in GBP, and egress is unmetered on every tier. The number on your invoice is the number you chose.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Both platforms deploy a git repo as a running container in minutes. The real split is the pricing model: Railway meters usage and bandwidth, whilst Ruust charges a flat monthly price per Egg with no egress bill. Here is how they line up.
| Ruust | Railway | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat per Egg, per month, in GBP. You know the bill before you deploy. | Usage-based: RAM and CPU tend to be metered by the minute, on a plan plus pay-as-you-go. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No bandwidth bill, ever. | Network egress tends to be metered and billed on top of your compute usage. |
| Currency | Priced in GBP, the same in every region. No FX surprises for UK teams. | Priced in USD, so UK cards tend to see conversion and card fees. |
| Always-on | Every Egg is kept warm 24/7. No cold starts, no spin-up lag. | Runs your services continuously; free-tier projects tend to sleep after inactivity. |
| Preset sizes | Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24. Custom slider at £12/vCPU + £6/GB. | No fixed sizes; cost tends to track measured resource consumption over the month. |
| Deploy flow | Connect a repo (Nixpacks or your Dockerfile), live on HTTPS in about two minutes. | Connect a repo, autobuild and deploy quickly with a polished developer flow. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis Eggs with persistent volumes, private to your Coop. | Managed database services you can add to a project alongside your app. |
| Regions | eu-west (London) and us-east (Virginia) live, Frankfurt and Singapore coming. | Multiple regions available across its global footprint. |
Railway details are as we understand them and can change. Always check Railway's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
The bill is flat, in GBP, and picked by you
Choose an Egg size and pay that price every month, the same in every region. There is no per-minute meter on RAM or CPU, so a quiet month and a busy month cost the same. Usage-based pricing is a tax on being always-on, and Ruust simply does not charge it.
Unmetered egress, so traffic is never a liability
Every tier includes unmetered egress, which means no bandwidth line item and no surprise at the end of a good month. Serve a viral launch or a heavy API without watching a counter. Fair-use rate caps keep abuse out, but your volume is never metered or billed.
Always warm, no cold starts
Ruust keeps every Egg running 24/7, so there is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag on the first request after a quiet spell. That suits the small, always-on apps, side projects and internal tools that should just answer instantly, without you paying more to keep them awake.
Built for many small apps, not one big meter
Private networking inside a Coop, managed Postgres and Redis Eggs, custom domains with automatic TLS, zero-downtime rolling deploys and horizontal replicas all come as standard. Run a dozen tiny always-on services and each one is a predictable, flat line on the invoice.
Where Railway is the better fit.
A genuinely polished developer experience
Railway has earned its reputation. The dashboard, the templates and the deploy flow are smooth and pleasant, and plenty of teams ship happily on it every day. If a refined product experience is your top priority, it is a strong choice.
Usage-based can be cheaper for spiky, bursty work
If your workload is genuinely intermittent, a per-minute meter can cost less than a flat always-on price. Batch jobs, occasional cron tasks and services that idle most of the day may bill lower on a metered model than on a warm-24/7 one.
A broad ecosystem and template library
Railway offers a wide catalogue of one-click templates and integrations, and a large community around them. If you want to stand up a well-known stack from a template in a couple of clicks, that breadth is a real advantage.
Ruust vs Railway, the common questions.
Is Ruust actually cheaper than Railway?
It depends on your workload, and we would rather be straight than glib. For small, always-on apps that serve steady or heavy traffic, a flat GBP price with unmetered egress is usually cheaper and always more predictable. For spiky, mostly-idle workloads, a metered platform like Railway can sometimes cost less. The honest win with Ruust is knowing the number in advance.
What does unmetered egress really mean?
It means there is no bill for bandwidth and no volume cap on any tier, so a traffic spike never becomes a line item. We do keep per-Egg fair-use rate caps to stop abuse, but your egress volume is never metered or charged. That is different from a metered model, where usage tends to start costing money once it passes a threshold.
Do I get cold starts like a free tier that sleeps?
No. Every Egg on Ruust is kept warm 24/7, so there is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up delay on the first request after a quiet period. Free tiers elsewhere tend to sleep projects after inactivity; Ruust keeps yours live all the time on every paid tier.
Can I migrate from Railway to Ruust easily?
Usually yes. If it runs in a container it runs on Ruust. Connect your git repo and let Nixpacks autobuild it or bring your own Dockerfile, pick a region and size, and you are live on HTTPS in about two minutes with TLS issued in roughly ninety seconds. Point your custom domain over and automatic TLS handles the certificate.