$ man railway

Railway

Hosting platform for backend services, databases, and long-running agents. Handles the workloads Vercel cannot.

by Shawn Tenam

Vercel is built for frontend and serverless functions. Serverless has a hard timeout - usually 10 seconds on the free tier, 60 seconds on Pro. If your agent needs to run for 5 minutes enriching 200 leads, Vercel kills it. Railway runs persistent processes. Your agent starts, runs as long as it needs, and stays alive. It also hosts databases, Redis instances, and background workers. For GTM engineers deploying agents that do heavy enrichment, research compilation, or multi-step orchestration, Railway is where those agents live. SDK kits from providers like LangChain and Trigger.dev deploy directly to Railway.

Connect your GitHub repo. Railway detects the runtime (Node, Python, Go). Push code and it deploys. Add environment variables in the dashboard. Set up a cron schedule or let it run continuously. Railway handles scaling, logs, and restarts. The cost model is usage-based - you pay for compute time, not a flat monthly rate.