Railway-fast deploys, on infrastructure you own.
Railway is a joy to start with: connect a repo and you're live in minutes. But it all runs on Railway's cloud, and usage-based billing that feels cheap on a side project gets harder to forecast as traffic grows — a busy month can add up in ways you didn't plan for.
Miren gives you that same connect-and-ship speed on infrastructure you own. Push your code — no Dockerfile — and Miren builds it, runs it, and scales it with traffic. You pay for your own servers, so the bill is something you can actually predict.
| Railway | Miren | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Railway's managed cloud — you don't run the servers | Your own infrastructure — a VPS, a cloud box, or bare metal |
| Pricing | Usage-based, billed per second. Flexible, but hard to forecast as you grow. | You pay for your own infrastructure — predictable, and yours to forecast |
| Deploys | Connect a GitHub repo; Railway builds it for you | Push your code — no Dockerfile required |
| PR previews | Preview environments for every pull request | Preview environments too, declared in your config |
| Autoscaling | Automatic vertical scaling; you add replicas by hand | On by default — Miren adjusts instance counts with traffic |
| Lock-in | Managed platform; leaving means moving your databases and pipeline | Runs on infrastructure you own — leave whenever you want |
| Team access | Per-seat pricing on paid plans | Auth and access control included, through Miren Cloud |
| Free tier | One-time $5 trial credit; no permanent free tier | Free to self-host — run it on hardware you've already got |
Railway has become the go-to Heroku alternative for good reason. The developer experience is genuinely excellent — connect a GitHub repo and you're deployed in minutes, with automatic builds, preview environments for every PR, and instant rollbacks. One-click database provisioning and a template marketplace make it trivial to stand up a full stack. For developers who want to ship fast without thinking about infrastructure, Railway delivers.
Railway is a fully managed platform, which means your applications, databases, and networking all live on infrastructure you don't control. Usage-based pricing is flexible for small projects but can become hard to predict as you scale. The platform creates real lock-in: migrating away means moving your databases, reconfiguring networking, and rebuilding your deployment pipeline. It's a strong experience within those constraints, but they're worth understanding upfront.
Miren matches Railway's deployment simplicity — deploy straight from your code, no Dockerfile needed — but on infrastructure you own and control. Where Railway's usage-based pricing can be unpredictable at scale, running on your own infrastructure means predictable costs you can forecast. Miren autoscales by default just like Railway, and Miren Cloud gives you team authentication and access control out of the box.
Get started in minutes and see how deployment should feel.