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Watasu vs Railway: always-on apps with fixed prices, hosted in Europe

Last verified: 5 Nov 2026 Prices and limits as of November 2026 Found an error? info@watasu.io

Run your Railway workloads on Watasu with fixed monthly pod prices, no per-seat fees, and app hosting in Germany. Keep Git deploys, Dockerfiles, and review apps as you move.

Railway runs its own hardware in four regions (California, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore) and bills resource usage against a monthly workspace subscription. Watasu is a European platform as a service. It runs your apps, workers, databases, real-time services and AI sandboxes on servers in Germany, and lets each process choose between a fixed monthly price and measured usage with a ceiling, on one prepaid balance in euros. Team seats are free and normal app bandwidth is included.

This page compares the two platforms on pricing, data location, services, real-time support and developer workflow, and then shows how to move a Railway project to Watasu. If you are looking for a Railway alternative with predictable prices and data that stays in the EU, start with the table.

Start buildingMigration guide

Who should choose which

What Watasu and Railway have in common

• Git-based deploys. Connect a GitHub repository and configure a branch to build and deploy automatically on push. A Dockerfile is used when present.
• Long-running services. Run persistent web servers, workers and databases as services.
• Preview environments. Enable preview environments to review pull requests before merging. Watasu review apps use an app.json file.
• Private networking. Services talk to each other over a private network without being exposed to the internet.
• Replicas. Set replica counts for individual services. Watasu Standard and Dynamic pods support multiple replicas.

Watasu vs Railway at a glance

Compare Railway Pro with Watasu’s Standard and Dynamic pods.

Pricing

Watasu app builds have limits of 16 vCPU and 30 GiB RAM and cost €0.50/hour by actual running seconds, including failed and canceled builds. Queue time and image-only pipeline promotions have no build charge. Before execution, a temporary hold of up to €0.50 funds at most one hour, or a shorter deadline from a smaller available balance; unused funds return after the build stops. Enough available balance for one second is required, with no saved-card requirement or free monthly build allowance. App runtime examples below exclude build charges unless a build row is shown.

Railway Pro costs $20 per month per workspace, with unlimited seats and $20 of usage included. Everything beyond that is billed per second for what your services actually consume: $20 per vCPU-month, $10 per GB-month of memory, $0.15 per GB-month of volume storage and $0.05 per GB of egress. Builds are free. This model can suit bursty workloads. Monthly costs vary with compute, memory and traffic.

Watasu has no per-seat fees. Top up a prepaid balance in euros from €5 and pay for the resources you use. Each process picks one of two billing models:

• Standard: a fixed monthly price per replica for sustained load, for example €15 for 1 vCPU and 2 GiB, however busy it is.
• Dynamic: measured CPU and memory (€20 per average vCPU-month and €10 per average GiB-month), with a hard monthly ceiling per replica, for quieter APIs, staging and review apps.

Normal app bandwidth is included. App builds cost €0.50/hour by running seconds. If the balance runs out, apps pause until you top up.

The difference shows on services that are busy all day and on traffic. Example monthly costs:

Railway Pro starts at $20 per workspace and includes $20 of usage. Usage figures count toward that minimum. The stack estimate uses two web replicas averaging 0.5 vCPU and 2 GB each, a worker at 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB, PostgreSQL at 0.5 vCPU and 4 GB with a 64 GB volume, Redis at 0.1 vCPU and 250 MB in memory, and 500 GB of egress. The Watasu total includes three Standard 1× replicas, PostgreSQL Standard 1, Valkey Premium 2 and Logs Hobby 0. These estimates use each platform’s published units, currencies and plan sizes.

Key differences

Infrastructure: usage billing vs fixed pods

Railway runs every service as a container on its own hardware and measures what it uses. Service usage is billed within the plan’s resource limits. When enabled, Serverless mode can put an eligible service to sleep about 5–10 minutes after its last outbound traffic. The next request wakes it, which can add latency.

On Watasu, your app is a set of processes defined in a Procfile, and each one runs as a long-lived workload in its own container:

• web for public HTTP and WebSockets, with managed TLS
• worker for queues, consumers and schedulers, not reachable from the internet
• *-tcp for private TCP and gRPC services, reachable only by apps you allow
• *-rtc for WebRTC and voice, with a dedicated TURN gateway and public UDP
• release for migrations that run before each new version goes live

Each process gets a size, from a small Hobby pod up to 16 vCPU and 30 GiB of RAM, and a billing model: fixed Standard for steady load, or measured Dynamic for quiet services. Once a process has two or more replicas, Watasu spreads them across separate zones at no extra charge.

Where your data lives

Railway Corporation is a U.S. company. You can deploy services in Amsterdam using Railway's EU West region. Check each service's data location separately from where your app runs.

The U.S. CLOUD Act can apply even when data is hosted in the EU. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2713, valid U.S. legal process can require a covered provider to disclose data in its possession, custody or control, wherever that data is stored.

Watasu LTD is registered in England and Wales. Watasu hosts apps and add-ons in Germany and keeps customer workload data in the EU.

Databases and backend services

Railway offers templates for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis and MongoDB. Available options include high availability and backups, with point-in-time recovery for PostgreSQL and MySQL. The database runs as a service in your project and is billed like any other service, by CPU, memory and volume use. Anything else, from analytics to vector search, comes from Docker images or community templates that you run and look after yourself.

Watasu runs its data services itself, next to your apps, at a fixed price per plan:

Attach a service with watasu addons:create and Watasu injects the connection variables into your app. Backup and recovery options depend on the add-on and plan. PostgreSQL Standard and Premium include scheduled backups and support restore and promotion.

Real-time, voice and AI workloads

Railway exposes services over HTTP and a TCP proxy, but it doesn’t accept inbound UDP, so voice and video workloads that require inbound UDP need a separate media host. Railway also offers sandboxes for agent code, with separate compute and memory rates.

On Watasu, *-rtc processes get a TURN gateway, a public UDP port and a stable hostname for each replica, and you bring your SFU, such as LiveKit Server, mediasoup or Pion. Signalling, media, agent logic and the database run on one platform, close to European users. Sandboxes give agents isolated Linux environments in the EU with templates, SSH, file and command APIs, pause and resume, disk checkpoints and outbound network policies. A sandbox configured with 2 vCPU and 1 GiB costs about €0.16 per running hour in compute and memory. Basic has no monthly subscription fee. Runtime and retained storage are billed separately.

Developer workflow

Railway organises services on a visual project canvas and has a large marketplace of one-click templates.

Watasu keeps the Procfile workflow: one app holds all of its processes and attached services, and a team can share services across apps. Pipelines move the same tested image from staging to production without a rebuild. Access is set per app or pipeline with four roles: Viewer, Deployer, Operator and Maintainer. Attaching Logs, Metrics or Traces provisions a free Grafana workspace for the app. Dashboards stored in the repository can sync on release. You can also connect Claude or another AI assistant over MCP to inspect apps, query logs and manage resources.

When Railway is the better fit

Railway is a strong choice in a few cases:

• Your users are in the US or Asia and you need compute in California, Virginia or Singapore.
• Most of your services are idle most of the time, so Serverless sleep can reduce compute usage within the workspace’s billing plan.
• You want to launch open-source tools from a large one-click template marketplace.
• Your security review needs a SOC 2 Type II report or a HIPAA BAA today.

If your services serve traffic all day, your users or customers are in Europe, or you need WebRTC and managed analytics or vector databases, Watasu runs the whole thing on one platform with fixed monthly Standard pod prices and a separate Dynamic option for quieter processes.

Migrate from Railway to Watasu

Start by mapping your Railway services to Watasu processes and managed add-ons. Sign up at dash.watasu.io, then test the new setup before switching traffic.

1. Create the app and connect GitHub. Create an app in the dashboard or with the CLI, then connect your repository for automatic deploys, or push directly with git push watasu main.
2. Map your services to processes. For services that share an image, define process types in a Procfile: the public service becomes web, background services become worker, and internal TCP services become *-tcp. Make sure the web process listens on 0.0.0.0:$PORT. Railway cron services become a scheduler in a worker process. Use separate Watasu apps for services that need separate images. A root Dockerfile takes precedence over Cloud Native Buildpacks.
3. Add your databases. Attach PostgreSQL or Valkey with one command, for example watasu addons:create postgresql --app my-app. Watasu injects the connection variables. Move your data with pg_dump from the Railway database’s public connection URL and pg_restore into Watasu, and copy files from Railway buckets or volumes into Object Storage.
4. Copy your environment variables. Export each service’s variables from the Railway dashboard or CLI into a .env file, remove the database URLs Watasu will set for you, then import the remaining settings with watasu config:set --file .env --app my-app. Review overlapping keys when combining services in one app and use --secret for runtime secrets.
5. Point your domain. Add your custom domain to the app, update the DNS record, and Watasu issues and renews the certificate.
6. Turn on review apps and pipelines. Connect the staging branch, configure review apps with app.json, and promote tested builds to production without rebuilding.

Moving a larger workload, or want to see your stack running on Watasu before you switch? Write to info@watasu.io and we’ll set it up with you.

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Frequently asked questions

Put your next app on Watasu

Deploy from Git, host in Germany, and give your team access with no per-seat fees. Choose a fixed price for services that stay busy.

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