Railway

Railway is what Heroku should have become if it hadn't been stuck in 2015. If you need a backend deployment platform with a real database, real workers, real cron jobs, and no surprise bills, this is the one. I run a bunch of side projects and small SaaS on Railway and the experience is just clean. The setup is uneventful in the best way. Connect a GitHub repo. Railway detects your language, builds it, deploys it on a public URL. Need Postgres? One click. Need Redis? One click. Need a second service in the same project (maybe a worker, a cron job, or a separate API)? One click. The whole experience feels like Vercel for full-stack apps. The pricing model is honest. Pay-as-you-go on CPU plus memory plus bandwidth, with a $5 monthly minimum on the paid tier. Usage is visible in the dashboard so there are no surprise bills. The Trial gives you $5 of one-time usage; after that it's Hobby at $5/month plus actual consumption. A typical small SaaS runs $15-30/month all-in. Compare that to Heroku, where the same setup is $50+ just for dynos. The killer dev-loop feature is the CLI. railway up deploys from your terminal. railway logs streams logs from your services. railway run executes commands with your production env vars. It's a proper Heroku-CLI-quality experience but for 2026. Postgres backups are automatic. Custom domains work in 30 seconds. Cron jobs are first-class. Everything you'd want from a modern deploy platform. Where Railway falls short: cold starts on rarely-used services can be slow (under-provisioned services sleep). The free trial is one-time only, which means you have to commit to $5/month to genuinely evaluate it for more than a few hours. Some niche stacks (Crystal, Nim) need a custom Dockerfile. For 95% of indie SaaS backend stacks, Railway is the obvious modern choice. If you're on Next.js, host frontend on Vercel and your DB/workers on Railway. If you're on a full-stack framework (Rails, Phoenix, Django), Railway can host everything. Either way, recommended.