Railway vs DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean App Platform is the predictable-bill option: a fixed price per container with transfer included. The catch for Railway users is storage: App Platform has no persistent volumes.
Pick DigitalOcean App Platform if finance wants a fixed monthly number and your data already lives in a managed database or object storage. Stay on Railway if any service writes to disk, you need cron more often than every 15 minutes, or you want PR environments without writing CI.
Side by side
Railway vs DigitalOcean at a glance
| Railway | DigitalOcean | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | Plan + per-second usage | Fixed price per container, billed per second up to the monthly price |
| Cheapest always-on service | Hobby $5/mo, includes $5 of usage | $5/mo (shared vCPU, 512 MiB, 50 GiB transfer) |
| Free option | 30-day trial ($5 credit), then $1/mo of usage | 3 static sites; no free dynamic apps |
| 1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM | About $40/mo if fully used, less when idle | $25/mo (shared vCPU) |
| Postgres | One-click template on a volume; backups, PITR (about 4 weeks) and HA available | Dev database $7/mo (no backups, dev only); managed from $15/mo with daily backups and 7-day PITR |
| High-availability Postgres | Available on the same plans | New clusters: Advanced Edition from $130/mo |
| Persistent storage | Yes: $0.15/GB-month | None: local disk is wiped on redeploy |
| Egress | $0.05/GB | 50 to 250 GiB included per container, then $0.02/GiB |
| Regions | 4: California, Virginia, Amsterdam, Singapore | 12 for dynamic apps |
| Cron | Any crontab schedule (UTC) | Scheduled jobs, at most every 15 minutes |
| Preview environments | Yes: an environment per pull request | Not built in; DigitalOcean documents a GitHub Actions workflow |
Sources: App Platform pricing · App Platform limits · Managed PostgreSQL pricing · DigitalOcean database plan changes · Railway pricing · Railway plans · Railway backups · Railway regions. Checked October 22, 2026.
Where DigitalOcean wins
A fixed number every month
Each container size has one monthly price and comes with transfer included (50 GiB on the $5 size, more on larger ones). Only transfer over that is metered, at $0.02/GiB. There is nothing to forecast.
Busy services cost less
A shared 1 vCPU, 2 GiB container is $25 a month. On Railway the same size costs about $40 if it runs flat out.
Twelve regions
App Platform runs dynamic apps in 12 regions, including London, Toronto, Bangalore and Sydney, against Railway's four.
Where Railway still wins
Anything that writes to disk
App Platform does not support volumes: the local filesystem is wiped on every redeploy. Uploads, SQLite files or a self-run database need Spaces or a managed database instead. On Railway you attach a volume.
Cheaper HA Postgres and finer cron
For new DigitalOcean clusters, high availability now needs Advanced Edition from $130 a month (plan change, from October 15 for new accounts). App Platform cron jobs also run at most every 15 minutes.
Moving from Railway to DigitalOcean
- Rotate first: copy no secret from Railway as-is. Issue new database passwords and API keys and put only the new values on the new host.
- Move anything stored on a Railway volume to Spaces or a managed database first; App Platform has nowhere to keep it.
- Describe the app in an app spec (YAML) and create it from your GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket repo.
- Restore a
pg_dumpinto a managed PostgreSQL cluster (not the dev database), connect it over VPC, then switch DNS.
Common questions
Railway vs DigitalOcean: common questions
Is DigitalOcean App Platform cheaper than Railway?
For steady, busy services usually yes: a shared 1 vCPU, 2 GiB container is $25 a month with transfer included, against about $40 on Railway at full use. For services that idle most of the day Railway can be cheaper, because it bills actual usage per second.
Does DigitalOcean App Platform support persistent volumes?
No. The local filesystem is ephemeral and is wiped on redeploy. DigitalOcean points to Spaces object storage or a managed database for anything that has to persist.
Is the $7 DigitalOcean dev database enough for production?
No. DigitalOcean describes it as intended for development: it is not backed up by default, holds one database, can only be used by its own app and is deleted with the app. Production wants a managed PostgreSQL cluster, from $15 a month with daily backups and 7-day point-in-time restore.