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Open Source & Technology Partners

Railway wants open source maintainers to succeed. If you maintain an open source project that people deploy on Railway, here's how Railway enables you to manage your open source product end-to-end and grow.

Apply at railway.com/partners.

Earn commission

When users deploy your technology on Railway, you earn a percentage of the usage. The more your community grows on Railway, the more you earn.

  • Base rate: 15% of usage from your verified templates
  • Support bonus: +10% (25% total) when you answer user questions

See Kickbacks for details on earnings and withdrawals.

Manage your product

Community management

Your Template Queue in Central Station surfaces questions from users deploying your templates. While Central Station is our support platform, we are expanding it to be the platform for OSS maintainers to support their users. Answer questions to:

  • Help users succeed with your technology
  • Catch bugs and potential product improvements
  • Build community around your project
  • Earn the support bonus

Growth metrics

Template metrics show deployments, earnings, and support health for your published templates.

Monetize with private images

Want to offer a premium version alongside your open source project? Private Docker images let you create templates with proprietary code that users can deploy without accessing your source.

If you choose to make these private images available only on Railway, you are guaranteed to get commission for your work through Railway's template marketplace and kickback program.

Ways to partner

Apply at railway.com/partners. Your project must be open source or open-core. Once accepted, you'll be part of a thread with our team to guide you through onboarding.

Open source partnership

For open source maintainers who want to create and manage their own templates on Railway.

Onboarding process:

  1. Template verification: Create a template (if you haven't already) following our best practices guide. Reply in your partner thread for us to review and verify it.

  2. Documentation: Write a standalone guide in your documentation showing how to deploy your technology on Railway. Send us the page for any feedback.

  3. Social promotion: Once your template is verified and the documentation page is live, we'll engage with any social promotion you do. Send us a link in your partner thread.

What you get:

  • Verified template badge and featured placement
  • Product management of your OSS tool with the template queue and metrics
  • Monetization through regular template commission & private Docker images

Technology partnership

For open source technologies that already have community-created templates on Railway. Earn commission from all templates using your technology, not just ones you create.

Additional benefits:

  • Commission on all templates using your technology (even ones you didn't create)
  • A dedicated page for your technology on Railway for SEO and distribution (example)
  • Extended co-marketing with Railway

You're listed as a "maintainer" on community templates you earn commission from.

Onboarding process:

  1. Template selection: Reply in your partner thread with links to all templates that primarily feature your technology.

  2. Template verification: We'll verify a small selection of templates as recommended ways to deploy on Railway. Let us know which ones you think are the best fit.

  3. Documentation: Write a standalone guide in your documentation showing how to deploy the template(s) on Railway. Send it over and we'll provide feedback.

  4. Partner profile: We'll create a partner profile for you with a dedicated page showing all templates using your technology.

  5. Social promotion: Once the above are complete, we'll engage with any social promotion or co-marketing you'd like to do.

If you have any other questions, feel free to email partners@railway.com.