Compare
Selfhost.dev vs
RailwaySelfhost.dev and Railway both run Postgres, but for different jobs: Railway is an app deployment platform where the database is a lighter-touch add-on, while Selfhost.dev is a dedicated managed PostgreSQL platform. The Railway database limitations bite in production: backups and PITR are gated to the Pro plan, with no pooling, autoscaling or database user management. Selfhost.dev includes the full managed layer plus BYOC and 189 MCP tools on every account from $5.
TL;DR
The short
version.
Selfhost.dev is a fully managed database platform. Railway's Postgres is lighter-touch: it covers the basics but gates backups and PITR to paid tiers and omits pooling, autoscaling and database user management.
Selfhost.dev includes automated backups, PITR, connection pooling, monitoring and alerts on every account. On Railway, automated backups are Pro-only, with no pooling, no autoscaling and shallow monitoring.
Selfhost.dev offers dedicated Graviton compute with guaranteed resources. Railway uses shared infrastructure with usage-based billing.
Pricing comparison
Side by side
pricing.
Small DB (2 GB RAM, 20 GB storage, always-on)
- $5 plan + $20.44 (RAM) + $5 (storage)
- No pooling; backups Pro-only; basic monitoring
- t4g.small $16.56 + $1.60 (20 GB)
- Cheaper and fully managed: backups, alerts, pooling
Production (4 GB RAM, 100 GB, needs backups + monitoring)
- $5 + $40.88 (RAM) + $25 (storage)
- Backups + PITR gated to the Pro plan; monitoring shallow
- No pooling, autoscaling or DB user management
- t4g.medium $33.11 + $8.00 (100 GB)
- Everything included, no DIY, no tier fee
Same $5/mo, head to head
- Multi-AZ available
- But no pooling or autoscaling; backups gated to Pro
- No DB users, no BYOC, no IP allowlist, no IOPS control
- t4g.nano all-in, everything included
- Pooling, backups, autoscaling, DB users, IP allowlist, IOPS
- Multi-AZ available pay-as-you-go
Feature by feature
Full
comparison.
These Railway database drawbacks become clear when compared feature-for-feature against a purpose-built managed PostgreSQL platform.
| Feature | Selfhost.dev | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Database management | Fully managed | Lighter-touch, tiered |
| Automated backups | Daily + custom retention | Pro plan only |
| PITR | Included (pay WAL storage) | Available (Pro) |
| Connection pooling | Included (PgBouncer) | None |
| DB users / roles | Yes (roles + rotation) | None |
| Monitoring | Built-in dashboard (up to 6 months) | 3 basic stats, 30-day max |
| Alerts | Email + Slack, DB-specific | Generic service alerts |
| HA / Replicas | Multi-AZ standby | Multi-AZ on Hobby+ ($5/mo) |
| Autoscaling | Yes (scheduled + reactive) | None (usage-billed) |
| AI management | 189 MCP tools, from Claude / Cursor / VS Code | Platform MCP (infra only, not database) |
| BYOC | Yes (your AWS) | No |
| Pricing model | Pay-as-you-go, fixed rate | Usage-based (per vCPU-hr + GB-hr) |
| Dedicated compute | Yes (Graviton instances) | Shared infrastructure |
| PG config access | Full tuning | Dockerfile customization |
| PG version control | 16-18, managed upgrades | Manual via Docker image |
| Encryption | At rest (AWS KMS) + in transit | At rest + in transit |
| Regions | AWS worldwide | No region choice |
Deep dive
The 5 Railway Database
Limitations in Detail
1. Automated backups only on the Pro plan
On Railway, automated backups require the Pro plan. Selfhost.dev includes automated daily backups and continuous PITR on every account, you pay only WAL storage at $0.03/GB, with no tier to unlock it. That matters because an untested backup you wired up yourself is the one that fails silently and pages you at 3am; here it is automated, monitored and restorable from the first $5.
2. Shallow monitoring (3 stats, 30-day max)
Railway shows only about 3 basic service stats with a 30-day maximum history and no PostgreSQL-specific query insights. Selfhost.dev includes a purpose-built database monitoring dashboard with many parameters and up to 6 months of history.
3. No DB-specific alerts
Railway offers only generic service alerts. There are no database-specific alerts for disk usage, connection count, replication lag or query performance. Selfhost.dev includes DB-specific alerts via email and Slack on all plans.
4. No region choice, autoscaling or IOPS control
Deploying a database on Railway asks you nothing: you cannot choose a region, tune IOPS or throughput or set up autoscaling. Selfhost.dev lets you pick your AWS region, configure gp3 IOPS and throughput and autoscale on a schedule or reactively.
5. No connection pooling
Railway does not include connection pooling. For applications with many concurrent connections, you must set up PgBouncer yourself. Selfhost.dev includes connection pooling to handle connection management automatically.
A thinner, tier-gated database layer
Railway is an excellent deployment platform for apps and its Postgres now offers backups, PITR and Multi-AZ. But those are gated to paid tiers and it still omits connection pooling, autoscaling and database user management. For database-heavy production work you manage more of it yourself. Selfhost.dev is purpose-built for database management and includes the full layer on every account. And with BYOC it runs in your own AWS account, so you keep the exit path: walk away and the database is still yours. Comparing managed Postgres more broadly? See Selfhost.dev vs AWS RDS.
Cheap base price, expensive in practice
Railway's base price looks cheap, but backups and PITR are gated to the Pro plan and monitoring is shallow, so production teams often add their own: backup tooling, Grafana/Datadog ($0-70/mo), PagerDuty ($21/user/mo). Selfhost.dev bundles backups, PITR, monitoring and alerts pay-as-you-go, no tier fee and no engineering time required.
Railway's usage-based compute also means the bill moves with your traffic, a swing we measure as Bill Variance. Compare a quiet versus busy month on our Bill Variance calculator.
Selfhost.dev handles that swing differently: it is prepaid and pauses at a $0 balance by default, so spend is capped at what you top up, with no usage cap to configure.
Full-stack monorepo deployments
Railway excels at deploying full-stack apps (frontend + backend + database) from a monorepo, with scheduled cron jobs and build, deploy and network flow logs out of the box. If your database is a small part of a larger Railway deployment and you don't need enterprise DB features, Railway keeps everything in one platform. For database-heavy workloads that need production-grade management, Selfhost.dev is the right tool. If you're evaluating Railway as your app platform more broadly, not just its database, our ranked guide to the best Railway alternatives walks through the full set of options.
Related: Railway alternative platform ยท Best Railway alternatives ยท Railway vs Render ยท Full-stack app hosting
Migration
Switching from Railway?
We migrate you, free.
There is no migration tool to fight with, because you get people instead. A Selfhost.dev engineer plans and runs the move with you, end to end, at no extra cost.
Your Railway setup, data size and Postgres version: the free cost audit form is enough. You get the exact monthly number and a migration plan before anything moves.
Railway's Postgres moves with standard tooling: pg_dump and restore in one window for smaller databases or logical replication for a near-zero-downtime cutover. You keep full access the whole time.
We verify a restore on the new instance before anything switches, so your backups are proven before you rely on them and you flip the connection string when you are satisfied.
Free on every plan size. If the numbers do not work for you, you keep the breakdown.
Based on this page: ยท
On now or still deciding?
What's the bill you're looking at?
Roughly how much a month, all in?
Matched to RDS, we bill 3.0x less in ap-south-1 (Mumbai) and 2.1x less in us-east-1.
2 vCPU / 4 GB with 20 GB: $24.54/mo in Mumbai, $35.27/mo in us-east-1, against an estimated $73.75/mo on RDS.
See a real RDS bill, before and after →Neon meters compute hours and sleeps. We bill one fixed hourly rate and never sleep.
{price} Same number in a quiet month and a launch month.
Price your size →Two ways off the Supabase bill and you can keep the Supabase stack.
Self-host Supabase on a project server from about $0.02/hr or move just the database to a dedicated Postgres. {price}
How self-hosted Supabase works here →An enterprise client is moving production ClickHouse to us at up to 60% less.
Worked example: off ClickHouse Cloud Scale to always-on managed ClickHouse, $891.86 to $364.03 a month, 59%.
See the ClickHouse bill, before and after →A PaaS bills per service. A project server is one bill for everything on it.
Worked example: a studio consolidated client hosting onto project servers, $390.00 to $82.66 a month, 78%.
See that bill, before and after →A managed database for as low as $5 a month. Dedicated Postgres or MySQL on AWS, with restore, pooling and Multi-AZ failover when you want it.
{price} Postgres and MySQL price the same.
Price your size →A managed database for as low as $5 a month. Dedicated Postgres or MySQL on AWS, with restore, pooling and Multi-AZ failover when you want it.
{price}
Price your size →A managed database for as low as $5 a month. Dedicated Postgres or MySQL on AWS, with restore, pooling and Multi-AZ failover when you want it.
{price} Pay-as-you-go credits, top up from $5, no plan tiers.
Price your size →Most setups map onto two shapes: dedicated databases on AWS and a project server for everything else.
{price} Project servers from about $0.02/hr.
Price your size →Under $200 a month, the calculator beats a human reply. Price it there first.
What's it for?
Where do your users mostly sit?
Dedicated managed Postgres or MySQL, with point-in-time restore, pooling and Multi-AZ failover when you want it.
{region} If you need scale-to-zero or instant branching, Neon fits better than we do.
What managed Postgres includes →Managed ClickHouse for events at volume or TimescaleDB on managed Postgres for time-series next to your app data.
Worked example: off ClickHouse Cloud Scale, $891.86 to $364.03 a month, 59%. {region}
See the ClickHouse bill, before and after →pgvector on managed Postgres: one database instead of a second vendor.
{region} TimescaleDB is one click away on the same instance if you also have time-series.
When a dedicated vector DB is worth it →A project server from about $0.02/hr: push to GitHub and it deploys, several apps and their databases on one box.
Auto-deploy on push, PR previews, custom domains. The $5 welcome credit covers the start of it, no card and you can pause it to $0.
How Projects work →Project servers: many sites per server, one bill.
Worked example: a studio consolidated client hosting, $390.00 to $82.66 a month, 78%.
See that bill, before and after →Most things fit dedicated databases on AWS plus a project server for the apps.
{region}
See it in the live demo →What are you trying to do?
Which editor?
We migrate you, free, on every plan size.
An engineer runs it with you: match the instance, replicate or dump and restore, test the restore, cut over.
See one migration, step by step →The Supabase stack, one click, on a server of your own.
One click from the template, on a project server from about $0.02/hr. Nothing to build or wire up.
The Supabase deploy guide →Paste one config and your editor can run the whole backend.
Run it once, sign in when the browser opens and all 189 tools register.
An hourly instance you pause when done.
Restore a snapshot into a second instance, point staging at it, pause it when idle.
Price a small instance →Push to GitHub and it's live: auto-deploy, PR previews, custom domains.
A project server from about $0.02/hr runs several apps and their databases.
Deploy guides by framework →The one that matters most:
A managed database for as low as $5 a month. Project servers from about $0.02 an hour.
The smallest dedicated Postgres, a t4g.nano with 1 GB, is about $5.34 a month in ap-south-1 (Mumbai) and about $6.41 in us-east-1 and the $5 welcome credit covers its first days. Pay-as-you-go credits, top up from $5, no tiers.
Price your size →When production needs help, you talk to the engineers who run it and a founder reads every request.
Outages, restores, performance issues and migrations reach the people operating the platform. No response-time promise or uptime percentage we cannot prove.
How support and recovery work →Failover, point-in-time restore and backups cover the common ways a database fails.
Multi-AZ failover is a toggle on every engine, Postgres and MySQL add point-in-time restore and all engines get automated backups, live metrics and alerts.
The reliability and recovery details →We migrate you, free. An engineer plans and runs the move with you.
Match the instance, replicate or dump and restore, test the restore, cut over. Any plan size, no extra cost.
See one migration, step by step →Run it in your own AWS account with BYOC, in the region you need.
Encryption in transit and at rest on every managed instance. We do not hold SOC 2 or HIPAA today and we will say so before you spend an hour.
What we can and cannot certify →Fair enough. The live demo is the fastest way to see it.
Or claim $5 to start, no card needed.
Watch the live demo →Our founder
You've already sent us your setup from this browser. A founder will reply to it; no need to send it twice.
Got it. I'll reply to within two working days, from my own inbox.
Noted. One note when it changes, nothing else.