Cost Control

Railway provides controls over resource usage in the form of usage limits, resource limits, private networking, and serverless auto-sleeping of inactive services.

Usage limits

Usage Limits allow you to set a maximum limit on your usage for a billing cycle. If your resource usage for the billing cycle exceeds the limit you configured, we will shut down your workloads to prevent them from incurring further resource usage.

Configuring usage limits

Visit the Workspace Usage page to set the usage limits. Once you click the Set Usage Limits button, you will see a modal where you can set a Custom email alert and a Hard limit separately for Compute Usage and Agent Usage.

The link above takes you to the usage page for your personal account. If you want to set a usage limit for your workspace, you can use the account switcher in the top left corner of your dashboard to access the workspace's usage page. You must be a workspace admin to configure usage limits.

Compute vs. Agent usage limits

Compute and Agent usage are tracked and limited independently:

Compute Usage covers CPU, memory, storage, and network egress for your services.
Agent Usage covers Railway Agent LLM consumption.

Hitting the Compute hard limit takes your workloads offline but leaves the agent available. Hitting the Agent hard limit disables the agent but leaves your workloads running.

By default, Agent Usage has a hard limit of $5 on the Hobby plan and $20 on the Pro plan. You can raise or lower this limit at any time from the Workspace Usage page, but unlike the Compute limit, the Agent limit cannot be removed.

Custom email alert

You can think of this as a soft limit. When your resource usage reaches the specified amount, we will email you that this threshold has been met. Your resources will remain unaffected.

Hard limit

Once your resource usage hits the specified hard limit, all your workloads will be taken offline to prevent them from incurring further resource usage. Think of the hard limit as the absolute maximum amount you're willing to spend on your infrastructure.

We will send you multiple reminders as your usage approaches your hard limit:

When your usage reaches 75% of your hard limit
When your usage reaches 90% of your hard limit
When your usage reaches 100% of your hard limit and workloads have been taken down.

Setting a hard limit is a possibly destructive action as you're risking having all your resources shut down once your usage crosses the specified amount.