Leanly vs Railway
Railway has excellent developer experience — clean UI, fast deploys, zero configuration. But it runs on Railway's infrastructure. Leanly deploys your app to your own AWS or GCP account. Same simplicity. Different ownership model.
This is not a feature comparison
Railway and Leanly are not different versions of the same product. Railway is a managed platform — your workloads run on their servers, subject to their constraints. Leanly is an orchestration layer — your workloads run in your own cloud account. It's a different category, not a better product in the same one.
The question is not which is better. It's which model is right for what you're building.
| Railway | Leanly | |
|---|---|---|
| Where workloads run | Railway's servers | Your AWS or GCP account |
| Cloud ownership | No | Yes |
| Vendor lock-in | Yes — proprietary runtime | No — standard cloud primitives |
| Compliance posture | "On Railway's servers" | "In our own VPC" |
| Ops required | No | No |
| Cost model | Railway margin on compute | Direct cloud rates + orchestration fee |
When teams move on from Railway
Pricing surprises
Railway has changed its pricing model before — teams that built on it got caught off guard when their bills shifted. When your workloads run on a vendor's platform, their pricing decisions are your problem. With Leanly, your compute runs in your own cloud account at AWS or GCP rates. Leanly charges only for the orchestration layer — and that's the only variable you need to manage.
The compliance question
Enterprise prospects and regulated industries ask: “Where does our data live?” The answer “on Railway's servers” fails that question. Leanly deploys to your own VPC, in your own AWS or GCP account — you control where data lives and who can access it. For teams pursuing SOC 2, HIPAA, or enterprise deals, that distinction is often decisive.
You hit a wall you can't work around
Managed platforms have hard limits: network isolation, superuser database access, WAL replication, custom VPC peering. These requirements don't come up on day one — they come up the day a compliance auditor asks, or an enterprise customer requires it, or a technical constraint forces the issue. Leanly runs on standard cloud primitives in your own account, so those walls don't exist.
Same ease of use. You own the infrastructure.
Leanly gives you the deployment experience of Railway with workloads that run in your own cloud account. No proprietary runtime, no shared tenancy, no vendor pricing risk — just standard AWS and GCP primitives in your VPC, under your IAM, on your bill.