Railway or Render for a small Node app with a database?
For a small Node app with a database that has to earn its keep in Europe, the honest comparison is on price certainty and on what is included. Railway charges by usage on top of a plan fee; Render's free tier sleeps and its free database expires; both bill in dollars. Dorelli's App plan is € 15 a month flat, with a Postgres database, a domain, email forwarding and a Dutch invoice, and the app runs in Amsterdam with its database in Dublin.
| Dorelli App plan | Railway (checked 22 September 2026) | Render (checked 22 September 2026) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | € 15 a month flat, no VAT added | Hobby $5 a month plus usage: $20 per vCPU and $10 per GB memory per month | free web service that sleeps; paid instances per month |
| Database | Postgres 1 GB, 10 connections, included | usage-based, billed separately | free Postgres expires after 30 days; paid tiers |
| Idle behaviour | scales to zero, first visit 10 to 30 s; keep-warm add-on € 9 | keeps running, you pay for the minutes | free tier sleeps after 15 minutes, wakes in about a minute |
| Container | 0.25 vCPU, 0.5 GiB, 10 GB traffic a month | you pick the size, you pay per second | fixed instance sizes |
| Domain, email, invoice | included, Dutch invoice, iDEAL or SEPA | own domain, dollar invoice | own domain, dollar invoice |
| Region | Amsterdam, database Dublin | several, including EU | several, including Frankfurt |
Where Railway and Render are better: any language, not just Node; more instance sizes on the menu; background workers and cron as first-class services; and a bill that scales down to nearly nothing for a toy project. Where we are better: a price you know in advance, and the domain, email and backups on the same invoice.
The deploy is one workflow file; the image is built on GitHub, your app gets DATABASE_URL and listens on PORT:
- uses: dorelli-cloud/cli/.github/actions/dorelli-deploy@v1
with:
plan: app
email: [email protected]The full file is in Deploy an app with a database. The first 14 days are free.
Not for
Apps in Python, Go, Ruby or PHP; apps that need more than 1 GB of data or 10 database connections; apps with background workers or queues as separate services. Those are a better fit for Railway, Render, or our Platform plan once it has the building block you need.
Checked against the code on 2026-09-22 · Evidence: lib/config.ts, lib/bundelgrenzen.ts, lib/addons.ts, content/kb/apps/cold-start.md