Every few months a wave of "we left Railway" posts shows up, and every one of them is really about the same moment: the app outgrew the hobby tier and the bill stopped looking cute. So instead of another migration story, here is the thing I actually wanted when I was making this call: an honest look at what Railway, Render, Fly.io, and plain AWS cost once you are past the free tier and running something real.
I am a cloud associate, so my bias is toward understanding the bill rather than avoiding it. Here is how these actually compare.
The tradeoff in one sentence
PaaS (Railway, Render, Fly.io) sells you time: you pay a premium per unit of compute in exchange for not running infrastructure. Raw cloud (AWS) sells you leverage: it is cheaper per unit and infinitely more flexible, in exchange for you doing the ops. The entire decision is where your app sits on the "is my time worth more than the markup" curve, and that point moves as you grow.
Where each one fits
