Run Ork and your agents' computers on Railway

What is Railway?

Railway deploys services from a repository or image and gives them HTTPS domains, volumes and managed databases. Usage is billed to your Railway workspace. Its sandboxes are separate machines created on demand, which Ork uses as bot computers.

Because the app and the computers live in the same account, you manage one set of credentials and one bill for hosting. Your model provider is still billed separately.

Each sandbox is its own virtual machine. New sandboxes run in US West unless a region is chosen.

Railway pricing

Railway charges a small plan fee that counts toward usage, then bills per second. Sandboxes are billed at virtual machine rates for the CPU they actually use and the memory they actually hold, not for their size, so a mostly idle desktop costs much less than its ceiling. The Ork app and its database run as ordinary services at the cheaper container rates.

Prices in US dollars unless marked, from each provider's pricing page, checked November 2026. Your model provider bills separately. Sources: Railway pricing and Railway sandboxes.

What Ork on Railway costs a month

Railway bills what a computer actually uses rather than its size, so this estimate departs from the method on the comparison page. It assumes the Hobby plan and one bot computer running 4 hours a workday, 88 hours a month, with a desktop and Chromium using about 0.5 vCPU and 2.5 GB of memory on average. The Ork service and Postgres run all month. Actual use varies with what bots do.

Estimated from Railway's rates, checked November 2026. A computer left running around the clock at the same load would cost about $150 on its own. Your model provider bills separately.

• Memory dominates: Railway counts the operating system and file cache as memory in use, so a browser with many tabs costs more than its CPU suggests.
• Ork stops idle computers, and the template allows each user up to three, which keeps the bill bounded.
• On Ork Cloud you don't need Railway at all; computers are included in the plan.

What a bot can do on a Railway computer

Each Railway sandbox becomes a Linux bot computer. You see it in the computer panel next to the chat, and you can step in when a bot asks for help.

• Use a Linux desktop and browser, with each bot on its own screen when several bots share one computer.
• Run shell commands and read and write files.
• Watch the screen live and take over, for example to finish a login.
• Keep its workspace between sessions. Ork saves the workspace before a computer stops and restores it on the next start.

When to choose Railway

Choose Railway when you want a personal Ork with nothing to run yourself and only one account to manage. It suits bots that browse, research and edit files, where a restart from saved files is fine.

If bots need to come back to the same open programs, Novita and E2B pause computers with their memory instead. Boat, which Ork Cloud uses, keeps each computer's disk and a Chrome profile per bot. If you'd rather use a server you already have, Docker is the default when you self-host. The sandbox comparison covers every option.

Limits

• No pause. Stopping deletes the sandbox, and the next start restores the bot's saved workspace. Open programs and anything outside the workspace are lost.
• There is no terminal you can open yourself, and a command's output arrives when it finishes rather than while it runs.
• The desktop installs the first time a computer is used, which can take a few minutes.
• On Railway's Trial and Free plans, the short idle timeout can delete a computer before its work is saved, and computers are capped at 2 GB of memory, which is tight for a desktop and Chromium. Use Hobby or Pro.
• Each workspace file Ork saves is capped at 64 MiB by default (RAILWAY_MAX_WORKSPACE_FILE_BYTES).

How to set it up

Whoever owns the Railway account does this. The Railway template is the quickest path and gives you a personal, self-hosted Ork.

1. Create a Railway API token that can create environments and sandboxes. A dedicated Railway workspace is safest.
2. Deploy the Ork template on Railway. Enter your email in OWNER_EMAIL and the token in RAILWAY_API_TOKEN.
3. Wait for Ork to become healthy, then open its generated HTTPS domain.
4. Sign in with your email and the generated OWNER_PASSWORD from the Ork service's Variables tab, then change the password.
5. Connect your model account in Ork and send a bot a message. Its computer starts the first time it needs one.

Using Railway computers with an existing Ork

If Ork already runs somewhere else, its admin can still put the computers on Railway. Set SANDBOX_PROVIDER=railway, RAILWAY_API_TOKEN and RAILWAY_ENVIRONMENT_ID on the API and worker, and optionally RAILWAY_SANDBOX_REGION. Or choose Railway in Settings → Computer and fill in the same values. The computer providers guide lists every option.