Railway
vs
Thunder Compute
What's good about each
- Billed by the second on actual CPU and memory utilization
- App Sleeping reduces costs on low-traffic workloads
- Self-owned hardware across US, EU, and Asia
- Template directory with a 15% kickback for template authors, 25% with active support
- Per-minute billing, nothing charged while an instance is stopped
- Per-second GPU sandboxes, each its own Firecracker microVM
- MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex
- 100 GB persistent disk per GPU, no egress fees
Price comparison
Closest matching configuration on each side, monthly list price in USD.
| Service | Railway | Thunder Compute | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small VM | $30.00 /mo 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM | -- Not listed | |
| Medium VM | $160.00 /mo 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM | -- Not listed | |
| Large VM | $320.00 /mo 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM | -- Not listed | |
| Block storage | $15.00 /mo 100 GB | $21.90 /mo 100 GB beyond free allowance · First 100 GB per GPU included | 32% cheaper on Railway |
| Object storage | $15.00 /mo 1 TB | -- Not listed | |
| PostgreSQL | $87.50 /mo 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB storage | -- Not listed | |
| Redis | $30.00 /mo 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM | -- Not listed | |
| Load balancer | Included in plan | -- Not listed | |
| Egress | $50.00 /TB $0.05 / GB | Free and unlimited |
Heads up: Figures take each provider's closest plan to a common setup, and vary by region and usage. Hover a service for the reference configuration. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.
GPUs
Thunder Compute offers 4 GPU models. We don't currently list GPU prices for Railway.
Services
Managed services each provider offers.
Compliance
Frameworks each provider states on its own site, each linked to its source.
Heads up: Each entry links to the provider's own statement. An attestation can cover one tier, one region or the platform alone rather than every service. Verify the scope before you rely on it. A dash means we found nothing to link to, not that the provider lacks it.
Company details
| Fact | Railway | Thunder Compute |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2020 | 2024 |
| Headquarters | USA | USA |
| Locations | 4 | -- |
| Example customers | -- | NYU Langone Health, MIT, ETH Zürich, UC Berkeley, Theseus, Conduit, InstaLILY |
| Website | railway.com | www.thundercompute.com |
Alternatives to consider
Compare Railway and Thunder Compute against other cloud providers.
Our data for Railway was last updated on Sept. 18, 2026, and for Thunder Compute on Oct. 22, 2026.