# Repair — Vercel Hobby could not carry the CMS

A flowingkhaos fix · monitoring · updated 18 Sept 2026
Source: https://flowingkhaos.com/fixes/vercel-hobby-could-not-carry-the-cms/repair

## The target

- **Railway Hobby**: 5 USD a month, and that 5 USD is spent as usage credit first (published).
  Past it, you pay for RAM, CPU and volume by the minute. It is a floor you can predict, not a cap
  you can hit.
- **One service, `cms`**, in its own project for OS-wide services. It is built from the monorepo's
  `main` branch on every push, as a Node 22 standalone image.
- **The data stays on Neon.** The service's `DATABASE_URL` points at the same database as before.

## The cutover, in the order it ran

1. **Run both side by side.** The Railway copy served the same database as the Vercel copy. We
   compared them response by response — health, users, videos, workshops, auth — and they were
   byte-identical. Media differed only in the host name inside each URL.
2. **Give the build a dead database.** The build step gets an address that goes nowhere on
   purpose. If a build ever tries to open a database, it fails at once instead of reaching
   production.
3. **Repoint the readers one at a time.** The flowingkhaos API, clevrstart, the flowingkhaos
   site, khaosmedia, luke-sidney, one background task and a few code fallbacks — each moved to the
   new host, each checked.
4. **Keep the old copy as a rollback.** The Vercel project still builds from `main`, idle, until a
   quiet week has passed.

## The rule that changed

**Migrations have one runner: a person, by hand, before the deploy.** Railway never runs them.
The database is shared by every app in the fleet, so an automatic migration on deploy is the wrong
default. An additive migration must land *before* the code that reads the new columns, or every
read of that collection fails.

## What it cost

| Line | Monthly | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Railway Hobby plan, usage credit included | 5 USD | published |
| The CMS container's usage beyond the credit | not yet billed at the time of writing | to be measured |
| The whole box (CMS, API, Postgres, cache) at idle | ≈ 13–19 USD | estimate |
| Neon database | 0 USD | measured |
| Vercel for the CMS | 0 USD, and a pool the other apps get back | measured |