PocketBase Cloud vs Railway
Railway is a general-purpose PaaS: deploy any Docker service or database and pay for what you burn. PocketBase Cloud is a specialized app platform: PocketBase + frontends + backends for a flat monthly price. This page compares metered flexibility against flat predictability.
Prices below are as of September 2026 — check the Railway pricing page and the PocketBase Cloud pricing section for current numbers.
Summary
| PocketBase Cloud | Railway | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | App platform (PB + frontend + backend) | General PaaS (any service + DB) |
| Entry price | $0 / $5 / $20 flat | $0 Trial ($5 one-time) / $5 Hobby (incl. $5 usage) / $20 Pro (incl. $20 usage) |
| Beyond allowance | Nothing metered on paid plans | Metered: ~$20/vCPU/mo, ~$10/GB RAM/mo, $0.05/GB egress, $0.15/GB volume |
| Database | SQLite built into PocketBase (S3 optional) | One-click Postgres/Redis, billed by usage |
| Frontend hosting | Included (5 on Free/Starter, unlimited on Pro) | Static + services, all metered |
| Auth / realtime / storage | Built into PocketBase | Compose yourself (or add vendors) |
| 10 small client apps | $20/mo flat (one Pro compute) | Sum of every service’s burn — scales with traffic |
Pricing: flat vs burn
Railway charges subscription + burn. Hobby is $5/mo including $5 of usage; Pro is $20/mo including $20 of usage. Past that you pay per-second for CPU, RAM, volumes, and egress. An idle app costs little; a busy month costs more. Estimating requires running a week and extrapolating — flexible, but every client site adds variable burn.
PocketBase Cloud charges per plan / per compute. Starter is $5/mo for one instance (3 GB, unlimited API, 5 frontends). Pro is a flat $20/mo for a dedicated 2 vCPU compute hosting effectively unlimited instances, frontends, and Node/Deno/Bun backends. Twenty small apps: still $20. The ceiling is physical (backends exhaust a 2 vCPU box first) — not a meter.
What you get out of the box
On Railway you assemble: service + Postgres + cron + static site + env vars + observability, each a line item. Full power for arbitrary stacks (workers, queues, any language), with per-service replicas, regions, and log history by plan.
On PocketBase Cloud you inherit: database + auth + realtime (SSE) + file
storage + admin UI + JS hooks + custom domains + logs/metrics, all inside one
PocketBase binary. pbc deploy auto-detects Next/Nuxt/Vite/Deno/Bun, and
pbc.json pins the target so redeploys are one command. Less composable,
far less to wire.
When to choose which
Choose Railway when:
- You run non-PocketBase stacks: long workers, queues, multi-service graphs
- You want scale-to-zero and pay-per-second for spiky workloads
- You need any-region replicas and native Postgres/Redis plugins
Choose PocketBase Cloud when:
- Your app fits PocketBase (CRUD, auth, files, realtime) — which is most freelancer/agency apps
- You sell fixed-price client sites and hate variable bills
- You want frontend + backend + DB on one invoice, one CLI, one portal
The honest bottom line
- One exotic stack, variable traffic — Railway’s usage model fits.
- Many standard apps, fixed budgets — PocketBase Cloud’s $20 flat wins, often by 3–5× at 5–10 projects.