Railway and Vercel both make deploying an MVP fast and painless, but they shine at different things. Here's how we decide which one a product should launch on.

Twenty years ago, launching a web application meant renting servers, configuring them by hand and hoping nothing caught fire on launch day. Today, platforms like Railway and Vercel take a code repository and turn it into a live, scalable product in minutes.

For an MVP that has to launch on a fixed date, that matters. Every day not spent on infrastructure is a day spent on the product. Both platforms are excellent, but they’re built around different ideas, and picking the right one early saves headaches later.

Here’s how we think about the choice during the specification phase of a 90 Day MVP.

Vercel: built for the front end

Vercel comes from the team behind Next.js, and it shows. It’s designed around modern front-end frameworks and serverless functions.

Where Vercel shines:

Next.js and other front-end frameworks. Deployment is close to zero configuration.
Preview deployments. Every pull request gets its own live URL, which makes weekly demos and stakeholder feedback easy.
Global performance. Static assets and pages are served from a worldwide edge network, so the product feels fast everywhere.
Serverless functions for APIs and back-end logic that run on demand.

Where to think twice: Vercel’s serverless model is great for request-and-response work, but it isn’t designed for long-running processes, persistent background workers or always-on connections. Databases are usually added through integrations with partner providers rather than run directly on the platform.

Railway: built for the whole stack

Railway takes a different approach. Rather than optimizing for one kind of app, it runs almost anything you can put in a repository or a container, alongside the databases and services it depends on.

Where Railway shines:

Full-stack and back-end-heavy apps. Rails, Django, Node, Go and more run as long-lived services.
Databases in a click. Postgres, MySQL, Redis and others can be provisioned right next to your app.
Background jobs and workers. Queues, scheduled tasks and always-on processes are first-class citizens.
A visual project canvas that shows how your services connect, which helps when a product grows past a single app.

Where to think twice: Railway doesn’t put the same front-end-specific polish front and center that Vercel does. For a mostly static or front-end-heavy product, it can be more platform than you need.

A simple way to decide

We start with a few questions about the product:

Is it mostly a front end talking to APIs? Marketing-heavy apps, dashboards over third-party data and content-driven products often fit Vercel naturally.
Does it need a real back end? If there’s significant business logic, a relational database at the core, background processing or real-time features, Railway is usually the simpler home.
Is it both? Many MVPs end up with a Next.js front end on Vercel and an API, database and workers on Railway. Each platform does what it’s best at.

There’s no wrong answer between two good options. The wrong answer is spending week six of a 90-day project fighting infrastructure that doesn’t fit the product.

Whatever we choose, you own it

On every 90 Day MVP, hosting accounts are set up in your name from day one. The infrastructure, the deployment pipeline and the product are yours. If your needs change after launch, both platforms make it straightforward to grow, or to move.

Wondering which platform fits your product? It’s one of the first things we’ll figure out together. Start the conversation .