Why I built on Railway instead of AWS

The first version of every product I've built runs on Railway. Here's why:

Railway does one thing well: it takes a GitHub repo and runs it. You push code, it deploys. You need an environment variable, you set it in the UI. You need persistent storage, you add a volume. The entire setup for a new service is under 10 minutes. At this point I can do it while making breakfast for the boys.

AWS does a thousand things with varying degrees of complexity. IAM roles, VPCs, security groups, CloudFormation, load balancers, ECS vs. EKS vs. Lambda. Some of that complexity is necessary at scale. None of it is necessary at zero.

Railway costs more per compute unit than AWS at high volume. That's the honest tradeoff. At early stage, the cost isn't the compute bill. It's the time spent configuring infrastructure instead of building product. Every hour on AWS setup is an hour not shipping.

When products start generating enough revenue to justify the migration, migrate. Until then, Railway earns its premium by getting out of my way.