Keel vs Railway

Railway provides a hosted application platform. Keel provides a similar deployment workflow for AWS resources in your own account. The main differences are infrastructure ownership, service integration, and billing.

Side by side

	Keel	Railway
Where your app runs	Your AWS account	Their infrastructure
Where your data lives	Your RDS instance, in your VPC	Their platform
What you pay	AWS prices, direct	A monthly plan, plus their own usage rates
AWS credits and discounts	Apply in full	Can't be used
Reaching your existing AWS	It's already there	Over the public internet
Access control	Your own IAM roles, MFA required	Their accounts and permissions
If you leave	Ordinary AWS, still running	Rebuild somewhere else

Your app and data stay in your account

Railway runs your app, your database, and your logs on their infrastructure. Keel puts all three in your own AWS account.

Your data remains under your existing AWS account and agreement. Keel has no hosted service in the request path.

Applications can access existing AWS resources such as S3 buckets, Cognito pools, warehouses, and peered networks.

Pay AWS, not a platform

Railway charges a monthly plan plus usage. Keel does not add a subscription or usage margin to the AWS bill.

AWS credits, committed-spend agreements, and Savings Plans apply to eligible resources created by Keel.

keel cost     # what your app will cost, before you build it

Backups and failover, handled

Your database is an RDS instance: automated backups, point-in-time restore, an optional standby that takes over if the primary fails, and a master password AWS generates and rotates without Keel ever holding a copy.

If you stop using Keel, the RDS instance remains a standard resource in your AWS account.

Room to grow into

Keel includes private networking, per-service IAM, WAF support, environment isolation, and deployment history. These features are configured in your AWS account rather than unlocked through a higher platform tier.

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