A Railway alternative for Laravel in Europe.
Railway is a usage-billed platform from San Francisco that deploys services, databases and cron jobs from Git, on hardware it runs itself, with a Laravel guide and opt-in sleeping for idle services. Brewless runs your Laravel app in your own Scaleway and bunny.net accounts instead, two European-owned clouds.
Facts checked on 20 October 2026. See the sources.
Railway and Brewless at a glance
| Topic | Railway | Brewless |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Railway Corporation, San Francisco, United States. | Coding Agency, Meppel, the Netherlands. |
| How your app runs | Containers built from your repository or a Dockerfile, billed per second, with vertical autoscaling and replicas you set yourself. | Serverless containers: your app starts with traffic and stops when it is quiet. There are no servers to manage. |
| Whose account | Railway’s own infrastructure. | Yours: your own Scaleway project and bunny.net account. Brewless is the control plane and is not in the path of your visitors. |
| Infrastructure | Railway Metal: hardware Railway owns and runs in data centres around the world. | Scaleway (France) for your app, bunny.net (Slovenia) for the edge in front of it. Both European companies. |
| Regions in Europe | Amsterdam, next to California, Virginia and Singapore. | Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. |
| Scales to zero | Yes, when you turn on Serverless for a service; it sleeps after a few minutes without traffic. | Yes, when you set the minimum to zero. |
| Price | Free trial with $5 credit; Hobby $5 and Pro $20 a month including the same amount of usage. CPU about $20 per vCPU a month and memory about $10 per GB a month, per second. | Free to try with one application. Paid plans from €15 a month, with unlimited environments on every plan. Scaleway and bunny.net bill you directly, and Brewless takes no percentage of that. |
| For Laravel | A Laravel guide: app, worker and cron as separate services from one repository, with migrations in a pre-deploy step. | Migrations as their own step in every deploy, queues on Scaleway Queues, the schedule read from your app, Artisan on the live release, and brewless init to start from a vapor.yml. |
What Railway does well
- Fine-grained billing per second, with low entry plans.
- A Laravel guide that covers web, worker, scheduler and migrations.
- Opt-in sleeping for idle services.
- Runs largely on its own hardware, with replicas in several regions.
Where Brewless is different
European clouds
Brewless runs on Scaleway (France) and bunny.net (Slovenia). Railway is an American company, with Amsterdam as its one EU region.
Your own accounts
With Brewless, the Scaleway project and bunny.net account are yours and bill you directly. On Railway, the infrastructure and the bill are Railway’s.
A fixed fee
Brewless charges a fixed plan fee; usage shows up only on your provider bills, at their prices.
One app, not four services
Web, queue and schedule come from one brewless.yml; the schedule is read from your app, so there is no loop running schedule:run.
Which one fits?
Pick Railway if
- You want quick deploys from Git with usage billing.
- You run several languages and databases next to each other.
- You need a region outside Europe.
Pick Brewless if
- You want your Laravel app with European-owned providers.
- You want the infrastructure in your own name.
- You want a deploy tool made for Laravel.
Moving from Railway to Brewless
Your Railway services map onto brewless.yml: the app becomes your web container, the worker service your queue, and the cron service is not needed because the schedule is read from your app. The pre-deploy migrate becomes a release command. Copy your database to Scaleway, test, then move your domain.
Questions about Railway
- Does Railway have a region in Europe?
- Yes, one: Amsterdam. Its other regions are in California, Virginia and Singapore.
- Can Railway scale to zero?
- Yes, when you turn on Serverless for a service. It then sleeps after a few minutes without traffic and wakes on the next request.
- Railway or Brewless?
- Railway hosts apps on its own platform and bills by usage. Brewless deploys Laravel into your own Scaleway and bunny.net accounts in Europe, for a fixed fee.
Sources
The facts about Railway on this page come from its own pages, read on 20 October 2026. Prices and features change, so check them before you decide. Spotted something out of date? Mail contact@coding.agency.
Other alternatives
- Laravel Vapor alternative Serverless platform on AWS Lambda; no new signups
- Laravel Cloud alternative Managed platform on AWS
- Laravel Forge alternative Server management
- Laravel Envoyer alternative Zero-downtime deployments to your servers
- Clever Cloud alternative Platform-as-a-service
- Scalingo alternative Platform-as-a-service
- Upsun alternative Platform-as-a-service on several clouds
- Koyeb alternative Serverless platform on its own servers
- Northflank alternative Container platform, own cloud or yours
- Render alternative Managed cloud platform
- Fly.io alternative Micro-VMs on its own servers
- Heroku alternative Platform-as-a-service on AWS
- Sevalla alternative Managed app platform
- Coolify alternative Self-hosted PaaS, open source
- Dokku alternative Self-hosted PaaS, open source
- Ploi alternative Server management
- RunCloud alternative Server management
- Cloudways alternative Managed servers
- Bref alternative Open-source framework for AWS Lambda
- Google Cloud Run alternative Serverless containers on Google Cloud
Try Brewless with your Laravel app
We open access to Laravel teams in small batches. Brewless is free to try with one application, production included; you start paying when you want your own domain or more.