Sarah BedellDeploy Together, Earn Together: Introducing Railway Partnerships
Today we’re launching Railway’s partnership program, designed on top of our template marketplace to ensure you, the creators of the template technologies, are rewarded for the great work you do. Learn more here: railway.com/partners
Let’s talk about marketplace economics. Marketplaces are usually measured by GMV (Gross Merchandise Value). It may feel unorthodox to think about marketplaces <> B2B SaaS, but isn’t really that uncommon. The big clouds have all launched marketplaces.
They have not been an astounding success, though.
Customers purchase software through the AWS marketplace when they have credits to spend. That, in itself, is not a value add - but rather, a simple budget optimizer.
We envision something completely different for our template marketplace.
For the user, templates are the easiest way to get started with Railway. Every template is a one-click deployment that gets a user from zero to one in minutes.
Templates can launch containers within Railway from repos or images, or even spin up services to call APIs that launch other managed services. No matter what combination of services you would like to deploy, a template can exist for that specific use case, no matter how specific.
Today, templates are created for one of a few reasons:
- We, the Railway team, needed to do something specific (like host Metabase)
- Our users see an opportunity and create the template (like with the rise of N8N)
- We, the Railway team, see an opportunity, and put up a community bounty for the template (like paying a community member to create an OSS LLM template)
Once the template exists, Railway is Switzerland. We make no bets on which technology will win over the other, but operate under a meritocracy: the best technology and template for that technology will be the most popular, and therefore most recommended.
This open marketplace dynamic, in combination with our community, is why our template marketplace today has a GMV of nearly $3M. And that’s just the beginning.
AWS, Google, Azure marketplaces couldn’t do it - but with our trajectory, we see the path to hitting a $1B GMV from our marketplace. How you might ask?
With a superior product experience and user growth supported by a vibrant, profitable partner ecosystem.
Today, we unveil Railway’s partnership program: a way for you to tap into the over 1.5M developers using Railway today.
Our goal is to grow into being your best performing acquisition channel. We are not experts in the technologies you build, but are experts in infrastructure. Let us help you with that.
Here’s how the partnership works.
What you, the partner, get:
- A verified template: ensure you make the best recommendations to Railway’s users on how to use your technology. 🆕 Verified templates have a dedicated place in our marketplace.
- Revenue sharing: as the partner you get commission as the template creator, and as part of the affiliate referral program.
- Understand your users: A better understanding of where product issues are through anonymous telemetry and optional direct user interaction.
What we both get:
- A growing user base and better user experience. Bring part of your users to Railway, and we’ll bring part of our users to you.
Today, we have an amazing set of launch partners:
Railway can be a revenue boost you get from open-source software, or an acquisition channel for your cloud software through starter templates. Either way, users get an improved experience when both Railway as the infrastructure provider and the partner as the technology creator optimize the way they deploy applications.
It’s not that deep. Get in on the ground floor of what’s about to change developer tool marketplaces.
Become a partner today: railway.com/partners
