Section 16

Railway Low-Cost System

Hosted Postgres + a small worker + cron. Costs ~$5–20/mo to run.

Stack

Railway Postgres (managed).
One Python service running scheduled jobs.
Railway cron triggers.
Object storage on Cloudflare R2 (free egress).

Project layout

text

app/
├── pipelines/
├── sql/
├── Procfile
├── railway.json
└── pyproject.toml

railway.json

{
  "deploy": {
    "startCommand": "python -m pipelines.scheduler",
    "restartPolicyType": "ON_FAILURE"
  }
}

Cron-triggered job

pipelines/scheduler.py

import schedule, time
from pipelines import ingest_claims, transform, build_gold

schedule.every().day.at("02:00").do(ingest_claims.run)
schedule.every().day.at("02:30").do(transform.run)
schedule.every().day.at("03:00").do(build_gold.run)

while True:
    schedule.run_pending()
    time.sleep(30)

Why Railway

Zero-config deploys, postgres + worker live next to each other, and the bill is predictable. Great middle ground between laptop and AWS.