Deploy and Host

Railway Pricing Calculator is an interactive web application that helps developers estimate monthly Railway hosting costs with real-time calculations, visual breakdowns, and accurate pricing based on current Railway rates across Hobby, Pro, and Enterprise plans.

About Hosting

Hosting Railway Pricing Calculator involves deploying a lightweight static web application built with HTML5, CSS3 (Tailwind), and Vanilla JavaScript. The application requires minimal server resources (~5-10MB memory) and can be served by any HTTP server capable of handling static files. It uses external CDN resources for styling (Tailwind CSS), visualization (Chart.js), and typography (Google Fonts), making it highly scalable and CDN-friendly with no backend or database dependencies required for operation.

Why Deploy

Deploying the Railway Pricing Calculator provides strategic advantages for cost planning, resource optimization, and budget forecasting. It helps Railway users make informed decisions between Hobby, Pro, and Enterprise plans while enabling organizations to manage team costs and support migration decisions. Developers benefit from pre-deployment cost estimation and learning cloud pricing models.

Common Use Cases

Startup Budget Planning - Estimate hosting costs for new applications before development, compare different Railway plans based on projected usage, and create accurate financial projections for investor presentations and resource allocation planning.

Development Team Education - Train developers on cloud cost awareness and optimization strategies, demonstrate the financial impact of different coding practices and architectural choices, and onboard new team members to Railway's pricing concepts and billing model.

Client Cost Estimation - Provide accurate hosting cost estimates to clients for web development projects, create transparent pricing proposals that include detailed Railway hosting expenses, and generate comprehensive project budgets with realistic infrastructure costs.

Dependencies for

Modern web browser with JavaScript ES6+ support for client-side calculations and interactive features including real-time sliders, chart rendering, and responsive design elements.

HTTP server capable of serving static files (Python built-in server, Node.js, Apache, Nginx) with internet connection required for loading external CDN resources including Tailwind CSS, Chart.js, and Google Fonts.

Deployment Dependencies

Python 3.11+ required for Railway's built-in HTTP server functionality - https://railway.com/docs Git repository connection for automated deployments from GitHub - https://docs.railway.com/deploy/github External CDN dependencies: Tailwind CSS (https://cdn.tailwindcss.com), Chart.js (https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/chart.js), Google Fonts (https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter)

Implementation Details The calculator uses official Railway pricing rates defined in the RATES constant:

const RATES = {
    MEMORY: 0.000231,          // $0.000231 per GB per minute ($10/GB/month)
    VCPU: 0.000463,            // $0.000463 per vCPU per minute ($20/vCPU/month)
    NETWORK: 0.000047683716,   // $0.000047683716 per KB ($0.05/GB)
    VOLUME: 0.000003472222222  // $0.000003472222222 per GB per minute ($0.15/GB/month)
};

Plan configurations include base costs and included credits:

const PLANS = {
    hobby: { baseCost: 5, includedCredit: 5, maxMemory: 8, maxVcpu: 8 },
    pro: { baseCost: 20, includedCredit: 20, maxMemory: 32, maxVcpu: 32 },
    enterprise: { baseCost: 0, includedCredit: 0, maxMemory: 48, maxVcpu: 64 }
};

Railway deployment uses railway.toml configuration:

[build]
builder = "NIXPACKS"

[deploy]
startCommand = "python -m http.server $PORT"
restartPolicyType = "ON_FAILURE"