Helm7 compared with Railway
Railway is the closest thing to Helm7 that already exists. Both run your services and your database in one place, both bill for usage rather than seats, and both are pleasant to drive from a terminal.
The differences are narrower than the other comparisons on this site, so this page tries to be precise about them rather than loud.
- Railway, worked example
- About $50
- Helm7, before usage
- $12 minimum
- Rows where they are better
- 3
One web service at 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB, one worker at 0.25 vCPU and 0.5 GB, one Postgres, on Pro.
How Railway is put together
Railway gives you a project and a canvas of services. You add a Postgres, a Redis, a web service and a worker, wire the variables between them, and it runs.
Pricing is metered on what you consume, with a plan fee that acts as a floor. That is the same shape as Helm7 pricing, and it is a shape we think is right.
Where they differ: Railway gives you primitives and leaves the application shape to you. Helm7 gives you a Product that already knows it has an app, a database, auth, storage and a domain, and that treats a change to any of them as one costed plan.
What Railway costs
Published list prices, read from their own pricing pages on 22 September 2026. If one of these has moved, tell us and we will fix it.
Their list prices
- Railway Hobby
- $5 per month
- Railway Pro
- $20 per month minimum
- Compute
- $20 per vCPU, per month
- Memory
- $10 per GB, per month
Acts as a usage credit.
Worked through
One web service at 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB, one worker at 0.25 vCPU and 0.5 GB, one Postgres, on Pro.
- Web service compute and memory
- $20
- Worker compute and memory
- $10
- Postgres compute, memory and disk
- metered on the same rates
- Pro plan floor
- $20 minimum
Roughly $50 a month at those sizes, drawn against the $20 floor.
What Helm7 costs
$12 a month runs one application in production. Each price is a minimum monthly spend. Usage draws down against it, and you only pay more if you use more.
No per-seat charge, and no charge for an agent key. Before you build anything, ask what it would cost: cost_estimate prices a shape without creating it, and every change returns a plan with its monthly cost on it.
Side by side
The rows where they win are marked. A comparison table with no losses in it is an advert, and you would be right not to trust the rest of the page.
| Capability | Helm7 | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing shape | A minimum monthly spend that usage draws down. | A plan fee plus metered usage, which is close to the same idea. |
| Cost before you build | cost_estimate prices a hypothetical shape. Every mutation dry-runs to a costed plan. | Usage estimates once resources exist. No pre-flight plan. |
| Auth | Managed, GoTrue-compatible, enabled with one call. | Bring your own, or deploy one from a template. |
| Object storage | S3-compatible buckets with no egress charge, as part of the Product. | Volumes, or an external S3. |
| Runtimes and templates | Anything with a Dockerfile. Detection and defaults are best for Next.js. | A large template library and long experience with many languages.They are better here |
| Regions | Two EU regions. No US region yet. | US, EU and Asia-Pacific regions.They are better here |
| Agent access | Every operation is an MCP tool. Keys carry scopes, spend caps and expiries. cloud_init starts a workspace with no account at all. | A public API and a CLI. No MCP surface and no per-key spend cap. |
| Irreversible changes | Destructive operations refuse without confirm: true and return the plan instead. | Ordinary confirmation dialogues. |
| Maturity | New, with a short operating record. | Years of production use and a large community.They are better here |
How a move goes
- 1
Recreate the shape
product_create with your repo URL, then service_create for each Railway service. Dry-run both and read the plan before applying.
- 2
Move Postgres
database_create, then pg_dump from Railway and pg_restore into the new instance. Use the direct connection string for the restore and the pooled one for the application.
- 3
Carry the variables across
Railway variables become Helm7 secrets, one secret_set per key. Anything that referenced a Railway service variable needs repointing at the new host.
- 4
Replace volumes
If you used a Railway volume for uploads, create a bucket instead. This is the one part that usually needs an application change.
- 5
Deploy
deploy builds the current commit and swaps traffic once health checks pass.
- 6
Move the domain
domain_attach returns the record to create, and the certificate issues once DNS resolves.
Service-for-service this is straightforward, because both platforms build containers from a repo. Volumes are the awkward part: object storage is not a drop-in replacement for a mounted disk, and code that writes to a path has to be changed.
When you should not choose Helm7
There are cases where the right answer is to stay where you are. Here they are, so you find them now rather than three weeks into a migration.
You need a region outside the EU
Helm7 runs in two EU regions today: Falkenstein (eu-central) and Helsinki (eu-north). There is no US region yet. Railway has US and Asia-Pacific regions today, and that is a real advantage we cannot argue away.
You run a lot of different runtimes
Next.js is the best-supported framework today. Anything with a Dockerfile runs, but the detection, the build defaults and the documentation are thinner elsewhere. Railway has more templates and more people who have already hit your particular problem.
You want a mounted disk
Helm7 gives you object storage, not block volumes. Software that insists on a writable filesystem path, such as some self-hosted tools, fits Railway better.
It already works and the bill is fine
Railway is a good product priced sensibly. If nothing about it is hurting, moving is work with no payoff.
If one of these applies to you, say so and we will tell you straight whether it is worth waiting. [email protected].
Try it on the trial first
One Product for 72 hours, no card, full API. Point it at the repository you are thinking of moving and read the plan it returns. That takes ten minutes and tells you more than this page does.