Lander vs Railway.
Railway is great for prototyping with Postgres + a backend. Lander gives you the same one-command deploy AND real per-customer AWS isolation, WAF, and a free tier that doesn't expire after 30 days.Railway built a fantastic developer experience around containerized apps + managed databases. Push from GitHub, get a Postgres in two clicks, deploy a Node/Python/Go service alongside it. They run on shared multi-tenant infrastructure (theirs).
Lander has the same one-click deploy ergonomics but runs your code in a per-customer AWS Fargate task — your own VPC, your own ALB, your own logs. Railway's free trial collapses to 1 project after 30 days; Lander's free is permanent and permits commercial use.
If you're at the prototyping stage, Railway is a great choice — their free trial is generous for the first month. Once you're shipping a real product, Lander gives you the same UX with real isolation and WAF for the same price tier.
[differences · side-by-side]
[feature]
[lander]
[railway]
Free plan duration
Permanent — no expiration
30-day trial → collapses to 1 project
Free plan commercial use
Allowed
Allowed (during trial)
Entry paid
$25/mo Hobby
$5/mo Hobby ($5 credit + usage)
↳ Railway is metered, Lander is flat
Compute isolation
Per-customer VPC + Fargate
Shared multi-tenant
WAF + DDoS
Every plan
Not included
Pricing model
Flat monthly + Claude overage
Metered (CPU/RAM/egress hourly)
Predictable bill
Yes — caps included
No — usage-based, can spike
BYO AWS
Team tier
Not available
[pick · lander · when]
- →You want predictable monthly bills (Railway's metered model can spike)
- →You need real per-customer isolation (compliance, multi-tenant SaaS)
- →You want WAF without an Enterprise tier
- →You're past the trial stage and don't want Railway's $5/mo + metered
[stick with · railway · when]
- →You're prototyping and want a generous trial
- →You need a managed Postgres with the same UX as your app deploy
- →You're comfortable with metered pricing and want to optimize it yourself
[migrating from railway → lander]
- 01Railway and Lander both use Dockerfiles — your Railway service usually deploys to Lander unchanged
- 02Migrate Postgres: Railway's `Database URL` → dump → restore into Lander's RDS or your own external Postgres
- 03Update env vars in Lander's dashboard (Railway exports them via CLI)
[FAQ]
Q. Is Lander cheaper than Railway?It depends on usage. Railway's $5/mo Hobby is cheaper at the entry but you pay metered CPU/RAM/egress on top. Lander's $25/mo Hobby includes 1 dynamic site + 50 GB bandwidth flat. For a typical small project, the bills end up similar; Lander's bill is more predictable.
Q. Does Lander offer Postgres like Railway?Yes — Lander provisions an RDS Postgres per environment if you set `LANDER_NEEDS_DB=1` in env vars. Connection string exposed as DATABASE_URL. Future versions will have one-click Postgres in the dashboard.
[other comparisons]