Moving sandboxes off Railway
Compute is $0.009 per vCPU-hour, with RAM and disk included. A 2 vCPU / 4 GB sandbox is $0.018 an hour: about 23× less than Railway's sandbox list rate at full use.
The trial needs a card and includes $5 of credit. Prices read 24 October 2026.
First, if you are a Railway user
On October 21, 2026, Railway disclosed that an unauthorized party may have accessed customer environment variables. Railway recommends that every user rotate all environment variables, API keys and private registry credentials stored there, and review service logs.
Please do that before anything else, wherever you run next. Moving providers does not rotate a leaked key. If you came here mid-incident, Railway's post and status.railway.com are the places to follow.
Is Impello the right fit?
Impello runs short- and medium-lived Linux sandboxes for AI agents, code execution, dev environments and CI-style jobs. It is a good fit if you used Railway Sandboxes or ran agent workloads in Railway services.
It is not a replacement for hosting a production web app:
- a sandbox runs for at most 12 hours ($20 plan) or 24 hours ($100 and $500 plans); at its deadline it is killed and its disk goes with it, unless you set
lifecycle: { onTimeout: 'pause' } - there is no SLA, no status page and no support channel
- sandboxes run in the EU only (Germany and Finland)
If you host APIs, databases or websites on Railway, a PaaS is the right tool for that part.
Price, side by side
| Impello | Railway Sandboxes | Railway Services | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | $0.0000025 / vCPU-second ($0.009 / vCPU-hour), allocated | $0.00001929 / vCPU-second, active CPU only | $0.00000772 / vCPU-second, as used |
| Memory | included | $0.00001929 / GB-second, held while running | $0.00000386 / GB-second, as used |
| Egress | included | $0.05 / GB | $0.05 / GB |
| Paused or stopped | $0 while paused | nothing once destroyed | — |
| Plan minimum | $20 / mo, all of it returned as credit | Free plan up to 2 vCPU / 2 GB; Hobby $5 / mo minimum usage, $5 included | Hobby $5 / mo minimum usage, $5 included |
Prices from railway.com/pricing and Impello limits and pricing, both read on 24 October 2026. Railway quotes its sandbox rates as about $50 per vCPU-month and per GB-month, and its service rates as about $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB-month.
The math: one 2 vCPU / 4 GB sandbox for one hour, at full use
Impello
- 2 vCPU × $0.0000025 × 3,600 s = $0.018
- RAM: $0 (not billed)
- Total: $0.018
Railway Sandboxes
- CPU: 2 × $0.00001929 × 3,600 s = $0.1389
- RAM: 4 GB × $0.00001929 × 3,600 s = $0.2778
- Total: $0.4167, plus $0.05 per GB of egress
- $0.4167 ÷ $0.018 = 23.1×
Railway Services (containers), for comparison
- CPU: 2 × $0.00000772 × 3,600 s = $0.0556
- RAM: 4 GB × $0.00000386 × 3,600 s = $0.0556
- Total: $0.1112, plus $0.05 per GB of egress
- $0.1112 ÷ $0.018 = 6.2×
What “full use” means here. Railway bills only the CPU a sandbox actually uses and the memory it holds. A sandbox that sits mostly idle can cost less there than these figures; one that builds, tests or runs a browser comes close to them. Impello bills the vCPUs allocated for every second the sandbox runs, so the price is known before you start. Pause a sandbox when it waits and it costs $0.
What moves over
- Your image. Build a template from Ubuntu or Debian with
aptInstallandrunCmd, at the size you need (cpuCount,memoryMB; RAM is not billed, so size it for the job). Build a template - Environment variables. Pass them with
envsonSandbox.create, from your own secret store. Use freshly rotated values. Impello has no secrets store of its own. - Long-lived work. A sandbox lives 5 minutes unless you set
timeoutMs, up to your plan's maximum. Pause and resume instead of keeping a box on, or setlifecycle: { onTimeout: 'pause' }so the deadline pauses it.pause()keeps memory and disk by default; a paused sandbox costs nothing and is kept 14 days. Timeouts - Public ports. Every listening port gets a public host by default; turn it off with
network: { allowPublicTraffic: false }. Network and public URLs
FAQ
Is Impello cheaper for every workload?
No. For a sandbox that is busy, Impello's rate is lower than Railway's list rate. For a sandbox that is idle most of the time, Railway's active-CPU billing can come out lower unless you pause the Impello sandbox while it waits.
Do I need a card?
Yes. The 7-day trial needs a card and includes $5 of credit; it allows 2 sandboxes at once and 1 hour per sandbox.
Can I run my production app here?
We don't recommend it. Impello has no SLA, and a sandbox runs for at most 12 or 24 hours.