Railway offers free 2 vCPU VMs you can start without an account

Railway, the app hosting platform, started handing out free Linux VMs without sign-up on September 25, 2026. Running ssh railway.new in a terminal starts a VM with coding agents preinstalled and a preview URL. No account or credit card is needed.

What you get

Item	Free VM
Size	2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM
Build time	60 minutes
Time to claim it	24 hours after that
Limit	3 VMs per IP address per day
Cost before claim	Free

To keep your work, you open the claim link in the welcome message and sign up. That moves the VM, its files and its URL into your account, and makes the URL shareable. Railway says unclaimed VMs and their files are deleted. When free VMs are at capacity in a region, Railway shows a message asking you to try again later; that attempt doesn’t count toward the daily limit.

The changelog doesn’t name which coding agents are preinstalled.

Part of a wider no-account push

In August 2026, Railway also let people create sites and databases at railway.com/new or dev.new without signing up, with 60 minutes to build and then claim them. Railway said it plans to extend this to more of the product.

What happens after you claim

Claiming means signing up, and from there the normal plans apply. Railway’s pricing page lists a free trial with a one-time $5 credit valid for 30 days, then a Free plan with $1 of usage a month, limited to 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB per service. Hobby costs $5 a month and Pro $20 per workspace, each including that amount of usage. Railway’s sandboxes, its other short-lived VMs, are billed from your credit at $50 per vCPU and $50 per GB of memory per month while running.

What to do

Use the free VM to try an idea or test a deploy, not to host anything you need tomorrow. If you want to keep it, claim it within 24 hours, and check how far the trial credit goes for a 2 vCPU, 2 GB machine before you leave it running.