P1launch
Railway Launches New Sandbox & VM Offering with Detailed Pricing
Railway has introduced a new 'Sandboxes & VMs' offering, providing isolated Linux VMs with usage-based billing for CPU and memory. This new service includes various sandbox sizes, idle timeout options, and features like checkpoints and private networking.
Before · Sep 5, 2026
Enterprise Support, Cloud Regions, Higher Resource Limits Everything above, plus prioritized support with SLOs, a dedicated Slack Connect channel, cloud regions, and services with 48vCPU/48GB RAM per replica.
After
Sandboxes & VMs Isolated Linux VMs for agents, builds, and untrusted code. Billed only for the CPU your sandbox actually uses and the memory it holds while running, never for the time it spends waiting. Learn more $ 0.00001929 per GB / sec about $ 50 per GB-month, while running $ 0.00001929 per vCPU / sec about $ 50 per vCPU-month, active use only for sandboxes Sandboxes Running sandboxes per environment Default sandbox size 2 vCPU / 2 GB 4 vCPU / 4 GB 8 vCPU / 8 GB Maximum sandbox size 2 vCPU / 2 GB 8 vCPU / 8 GB 32 vCPU / 32 GB Idle timeout Up to 5 minutes Up to 2 hours, or never Checkpoints, forks, and templates Private networking and public domains Enterprise Support, Higher Resource Limits Everything above, plus prioritized support with SLOs, a dedicated Slack Connect channel, and services with 48vCPU/48GB RAM per replica. How are sandboxes billed? Sandboxes run on Railway's VM primitive and bill on VM rates: $50 per GB of memory per month and $50 per vCPU per month, metered per second, plus $0.05 per GB of egress. You pay for the CPU a sandbox actually uses and the memory it holds while running, not for wall-clock uptime, so a sandbox waiting on a model or a user costs almost nothing. Destroyed sandboxes cost nothing, and an idle timeout destroys forgotten ones automatically. Sandbox usage draws from the same included credit as the rest of your plan.
Why it matters. Competitors should care as Railway is expanding its platform capabilities with a new compute primitive, potentially attracting developers needing isolated environments for agents, builds, or untrusted code. The detailed, usage-based pricing model for VMs could also influence competitive pricing strategies.