Oh heavens, would you look at the time? It’s Friday. This is a meaty update so strap on your oxygen tank and helmets because we are about to dive in.

Important housekeeping: all of the features discussed here will be enabled on the product come August 1st to make sure we can keep an eye out for any experience breaking bugs. 

It’s been a month since we announced changes to our pricing. We are pleased to announce that they are finally here. We expected to have all of these changes in the product by end of July, and well, would you look at the time.

Heres what is becoming active 

Prepaid Credit Option for the Developer Plan

Reducing the Developer Plan Discount to $5

Monthly 500 Execution Hours on the Starter Plan

our final announcement with more details here.

 We tried our best with being as transparent as possible throughout this process. Hopefully this stuff doesn’t come off as a surprise to ya, and if so, we are all ears to do it better the next time.

We made note to enhance areas of our product to keep you in the know about our offerings. Special attention was given to the purchase flows, documentation, and notifications to keep you in sync with your spend. Here are some of the features that arrive with these changes to help with this transition.

Users on the free Starter Plan will now see a nifty badge that shows your remaining Execution Hours and Credits. Instead of nervously checking the usage page, its now handy in the top bar.  Your deploys will be removed and your connection strings will be jumbled once you hit the time limit or your credit limit first. Once you feel that Railway meets your needs, you can top up your account with credits or upgrade to a usage subscription.

Previous user feedback from users on the starter plan mentioned that we weren’t proactive with emailing. Particularly when your resources were being close to being expended. Our engineer, Greg, has your back. We now have an improved drip-email campaign that will tell you when your credits are about to run out, or if you are running out of time. (Note: Railway doesn’t sell time but we can help you save it)

Wait… isn’t this what the next section is for?

We gathered a lot of feedback on our existing pages and believed that they needed to be modernized. A picture is worth a thousand words, so we have two.

Our designer Jitachi and engineer Faraz really honed in on what you have mentioned that was annoying with our old usage and billing pages.

It was difficult to see which services were incurring spend

There was too much information crammed in one screen

We decided to break up the flows into two pages to make it easier for you to manage your subscription and see prior invoices (another point of feedback). Then on the other hand, we expose a lot more about your project’s usage. Subsequently, we included paths to top up your account if you notice that you are running out of credits.

We hope this does the job of displaying all the information that you care about while also providing the fidelity into your account that you desire. Again, feedback always welcome and desired.

While we are talking about plans. Upgrading was a little underwhelming. Now we added flows so nice, you’d wanna cancel and resubscribe again.

Users and prospective upgraders would ask a lot of questions around our offerings. We added more information where it’s pertinent to pre-empt those questions. Right within this flow you can pick between two options while upgrading, a usage based plan or a credit based plan to pre-load a certain amount of credits.

Last big thing from this refresh is sparing your scroll wheel on the account page. We now reorganized the layout of your account settings. Common actions are now grouped together and additional care was made to make it mobile friendly.

All this and even more that we would want you to discover while you use Railway. As mentioned at the start, you should see these features all come live 

Lastly, we wanna give a special shout-out to all of the community members who provided feedback on our RFC, pricing, and general bug callouts that you’ve raised. We really appreciate you all.

Various backend fixes and improvements on the infra side to make our environments more reproducible.

Released Nixpacks v0.2.11, did we mention Fly is using Nixpacks now?

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1659053222/docs/new-plans_w7s6pk.png

The Great Plan Release, New Account Pages, Account Settings Refresh

Changelog #0092