Deployment Overview

Comparing deployment options

	Railway	Render	VPS
Ease of setup	Easiest	Easy	Manual
Estimated monthly cost (small)	~$5–10/mo	~$7–15/mo	$5–20/mo
Control	Medium	Medium	Full
Free tier	No	Yes (limited)	No
Managed PostgreSQL	Yes (plugin)	Yes (add-on)	Self-managed
Managed Redis	Yes (plugin)	Yes (add-on)	Self-managed
Custom domains	Yes	Yes	Yes
Best for	Fast start with no DevOps	Free testing / simple apps	Full infrastructure control

What every deployment requires

Regardless of where you deploy, these steps are required. Missing any of them will result in a broken or insecure deployment.

New JWT RSA key pair (not the keys from local development)

Production Stripe live keys (sk_live_ prefix)

Stripe webhook endpoint registered and pointing to your production API

Sending domain verified in Resend, EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS using your domain

ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Production

EF Core migrations applied to the production database

make seed run once against the production database to create the admin user

Deployment guides

Railway

Easiest path. Railway manages PostgreSQL and Redis as plugins. Good if you want to be running in production within an hour.

Free tier available for testing. render.yaml configuration included. Good for individual developers evaluating the product.

Full control. Ubuntu 22.04, Docker Compose, Nginx reverse proxy, Let’s Encrypt SSL. Good if you want to own your infrastructure entirely.

Required reading before going live. Security, Stripe, email, database, and frontend checks.