This edition of the Changelog is truly one for the books, because guess what?

Previously, new users got a 30-day trial and $5 in credits. Once the trial ended, you hit a fork in the road: upgrade to a paid plan or stop using Railway altogether. Not the friendliest experience.

Railway has grown into a healthy business

, which means new users don’t have to make this choice anymore and we can bring back a free plan. Here’s how it works: once your trial is up, you can continue using Railway on the free plan and get $1 worth of non-rollover credits every month.

"$1? That’s it?!" the changelog reader thought to himself.

While on the surface it might seem little, Railway only charges for 

. If your app isn’t receiving traffic or doing work, you’re not billed. Which means that $1 stretches a lot further than you’d expect, perfect for small projects or just keeping a personal site online.

If you’ve got that friend who loves free stuff, invite them to Railway (don’t forget to use 

), and tell them if they publish a template to the 

, they earn 25% of whatever we make when someone deploys their template.

Speaking of templates, the community has been cooking. A fresh batch of LLM templates just dropped that you can one-click deploy:

You can also check out posts from the template authors that discuss 

why host private AI on Railway makes sense

Now it’s time to dive into what shipped this week!

Automatic Image Upgrades to Priority Boarding

Automatic version upgrades for image-based services

: you can now enable automatic upgrades for image-based services right from your service settings.

You have full control over how updates are applied. Choose whether to automatically deploy minor or patch updates, and define a time window for when updates should be checked and applied. For example you can apply updates:

This is one less thing for you to worry about, and should give you more confidence that you’re running on the latest, greatest, and safest images.

 if you have any feedback or run into issues.

 as fast and the newly revamped Log Explorer is now GA. You’ll be able to sift through logs a lot faster and find the information you’re looking for. Here’s what you can expect:

You can filter by log level, attributes, tags or @ mention a specific service/deployment/replica. 

You can configure a time range from a list of presets or use natural language (e.g. typing 10m ago)

Copying: you can copy a row as JSON or only copy the log message

Customization: you can toggle the visibility of individual columns

View in context: When searching for a log, it’s often helpful to view the surrounding entries. You can do this by right-clicking the log and selecting “View in Context”

This is one of those things where you need to experience for yourself to feel how good it is. Drop us a line on 

 once you try it out, we’d love to know your feedback.

. We shipped this to Priority Boarding last week and it’s now GA.

Passkeys are an alternative to two-factor authentication (2FA). Instead of entering codes or relying on an app, they use your device’s built-in security features such as Face ID, Touch ID, or a hardware key.

This means easier logins without copying codes, stronger security since passkeys are tied to your device, and peace of mind with another way back in if you lose your authenticator app.

We improved deployments on the GitHub timeline where the Railway GitHub bot now shows which service, project, and environment was deployed. Previously it only displayed your PR name. This makes it easier to quickly understand what actually shipped without digging into details, and is especially useful when working in a monorepo

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1756503919/2025-08-30_qrvii8.png

Automatic Image Upgrades, Log Explorer, Passkeys

Changelog #0253