Railway Ditches Next.js: Builds Drop from 10+ Minutes to Under 2 Minutes with TanStack Start + Vite

Railway Migrates Entire Frontend Off Next.js: Build Times Plunge from 10+ Minutes to Under 2 Minutes

Railway, the popular cloud deployment platform, has migrated its entire production frontend — dashboard, canvas, and railway.com — from Next.js to TanStack Start + Vite in just two PRs with zero downtime.

The Problem with Next.js

Railway grew with Next.js from zero to millions of monthly users, but:

• Build times crept past 10 minutes — 6 minutes was Next.js alone, half stuck on "finalizing page optimization"
• Wrong paradigm — Railway's app is overwhelmingly client-side (real-time dashboard, WebSockets everywhere)
• Pages Router limitations — Shared layouts were hacky workarounds, not first-class primitives
• App Router mismatch — Server-first patterns didn't fit Railway's intentionally client-driven architecture

The Solution: TanStack Start + Vite

Chosen for being:

• Explicit and client-first — Matches how Railway actually builds
• Fast to iterate on — Critical for a team shipping multiple times daily
• Enjoyable — "It helps that we genuinely enjoy working with it"

What They Gave Up

• Server-side rendering (not needed for their use case)
• Next.js ecosystem (but gained Vite's plugin ecosystem)
• Image optimization built-in (implemented custom solution)

Why This Matters

1. Build speed = developer velocity — 10 minutes to under 2 minutes is 5x faster iteration
2. Next.js limitations are real — For client-heavy apps, Next.js can be more overhead than help
3. Zero downtime migration — Proves large-scale framework migration is achievable incrementally
4. Vite ecosystem maturing — TanStack Start is becoming a viable alternative to Next.js for SPAs