Railway Sandboxes
Railway Sandboxes are short-lived Linux virtual machines scoped to a Railway environment that can be provisioned on demand to run commands, read and write files, and then be destroyed. They target agent workloads and untrusted code execution, and are controlled programmatically via the TypeScript SDK, the Railway CLI, or the dashboard. The product reached general availability on June 26, 2026 after a public beta that started May 14, 2026.
| Pricing model | Per-second, billed on vCPU and memory consumed while running |
|---|---|
| Pricing The headline compute price as the provider states it. Sorting ranks prices stated per vCPU over time, converted to hourly. Other pricing models sort after, unranked. | $50/vCPU-month and $50/GB-memory-month (~$0.0000000193 per vCPU-second or GB-second); egress $0.05/GB |
| Free while idle Whether a stopped, paused, or sleeping sandbox costs nothing. | ✕ |
| Elastic Resources flex with what the sandbox actually uses, and the bill follows: yes when the provider bills on active or observed use, no when capacity is reserved or allocated and billed while it runs. | ✓ |
| Memory snapshots Whether RAM state survives a pause and resume, not just disk. | ✕ |
| Wake on request Whether a stopped sandbox wakes automatically on inbound traffic. | ✕ |
| Start / resume Typical time from create or resume to running. Sorting ranks stated times, converted to seconds; claims with no figure sort after, unranked. | – |
| Max runtime The longest a sandbox may run. | – |
| Isolation The isolation technology between sandboxes. | Per-sandbox VM on Railway's VM primitive (specific hypervisor technology not publicly disclosed) |
| GPUs Whether GPU instances are available for sandboxes. | ✕ |
| Docker Whether Docker containers can run inside the sandbox. | ✓ |
| SDKs | TypeScript |
✓ yes · ✕ no · – no cited public fact.
Sandboxes are gated behind Railway's Priority Boarding program; Docker is preinstalled in every sandbox. Only external interactions (exec or SSH) reset a sandbox's idle timer; processes running inside it do not. A sandbox defaults to ISOLATED networking (outbound internet only); opting into PRIVATE lets it join the environment's private network and reach other services.
Sources
- https://railway.com/changelog/2026-06-12-docker-in-sandboxes
- https://github.com/railwayapp/railway-ts-sdk
- https://docs.railway.com/guides/agents-in-sandboxes
- https://modal.com/docs/examples/gpu_snapshot
- https://cerebrium.ai/blog/reducing-gpu-cold-starts-with-memory-snapshots-restoring-cuda-workloads-in-second
- https://context7.com/websites/railway
- https://railway.com/pricing
- https://docs.railway.com/sandboxes
- https://servercompass.app/blog/railway-pricing-what-youll-actually-pay
- https://makerkit.dev/pricing-calculator/railway
- https://checkthat.ai/brands/indian-railways/pricing
- https://www.facebook.com/TrainStation/posts/%EF%B8%8F-sandbox-is-perfect-for-starting-on-a-grade-hauling-heavy-loads-or-getting-thro/1238087361801375/
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/@computesdk/railway
- https://x.com/Railway/article/2069801781916549204
Last verified 2026-08-06. Corrections land through the update log.