Shipcel vs Railway
Railway deploys services and databases from Docker images or templates and bills the CPU, memory, egress and volumes they use. Shipcel deploys to Cloudflare Workers, which cost nothing while idle, with D1, R2 and KV in the same account. For Docker workloads, Cloudflare Containers run on Workers Paid.
Which one fits
Choose Shipcel if
- You want a real free plan: after Railway’s one-time $5 trial, its Free plan gives $1 of usage a month (one project, three services, no custom domains). Cloudflare’s free plan includes 100,000 requests a day and 5 GB of D1 storage.
- Your traffic is low or spiky: Workers cost nothing between requests, while a Railway service bills memory ($10 per GB-month) and CPU while it runs, unless you enable its optional sleep mode.
- You serve a lot of traffic: Railway charges $0.05 per GB of egress; Cloudflare doesn’t meter static files, Workers responses or R2 downloads.
Choose Railway if
- You deploy existing Docker images or long-running servers in any language, with Postgres, MySQL, Redis or MongoDB from templates.
- You need persistent volumes ($0.15 per GB-month) attached to services.
- You want a hard spending limit: Railway can take workloads offline at an amount you set (minimum $10); Workers Paid has no hard cap.
Side by side
Plans and rates
| Shipcel + Cloudflare | Railway |
|---|
| Free | Cloudflare’s free plan: 100,000 requests a day, 5 GB of D1, 10 GB of R2 | One-time $5 trial, then $1 of usage a month; one project, three services |
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| Entry plan | Workers Paid $5 a month per account | Hobby $5 a month including $5 of usage; Pro $20 including $20, unlimited seats |
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| Compute | 30 million CPU-ms a month included, then $0.02 per million CPU-ms; nothing billed while idle | $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB-month of memory while running |
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| Egress | No per-gigabyte charge for Workers, static files or R2 | $0.05 per GB |
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| Storage | D1 5 GB included, then $0.75 per GB-month; R2 $0.015 per GB-month | Volumes $0.15 per GB-month; object storage $0.015 per GB-month with free egress |
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| Spending control | No hard cap from Cloudflare. Shipcel’s budget guard alerts over a budget ($0 by default) and can pause the app; Cloudflare’s budget alerts email you | Alerts and an optional hard limit that takes workloads offline |
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Billing and surprise-bill protection
- Railway’s hard limit stops all workloads when reached (minimum $10), with warnings at 75%, 90% and 100%.
- Cloudflare’s free plan is never billed for Workers, D1 or KV: over a daily limit, requests and queries fail until midnight UTC. R2 file storage bills usage beyond its free tier (never egress).
- Workers Paid ($5 a month per account) has no hard spending cap. Budget alerts email you when usage passes an amount ($10 by default) but don’t stop anything; per-Worker CPU and subrequest limits can stop runaway code. Shipcel’s budget guard alerts over each app’s budget ($0 by default) and can pause the app, minutes after the budget is crossed.
Moving from Railway
- HTTP services often run as Workers with the
nodejs_compat flag, or as Cloudflare Containers on Workers Paid when they need a full Linux environment. - Databases from templates need a replacement: D1 for SQL that fits SQLite, or keep your database and connect from Workers.