Railway Runs Open Source, Now We're Funding It
Railway's goal is simple: reduce shipping friction to zero so more creative software can materialize.
Open source is the foundation of great software. From Drizzle to Tailwind, engineers and vibe coders alike rely on trusted and available tooling to iterate quickly and deploy efficiently.
For years, we have been encouraging users and maintainers to run their OSS tools via the template marketplace.
Today, we are staunchly supporting open source maintainers by sponsoring them as part of the Open Source Pledge.
When we launched the template marketplace in 2023, the vision was simple: make deploying anything to Railway easier.
Most platforms pick a lane - frontends, backends, databases, AI interfaces, etc. Railway runs any part of your application, and even integrates directly with your AI stack.
It's really the long-tail of tools that solve problems: ORMs, automation platforms, CMSs. These tools have deep dependencies which need internal networking to run altogether (you might need a cache to run a CMS, a database to run an automation tool). We take care of this for you so you can focus on the building that sparks joy.
Today, our template marketplace has 1,800+ templates—n8n, Metabase, Redis, and more. They can be combined and expanded to run end-to-end applications, spun up by you or by Claude.
When those templates get used, creators earn a percentage of whatever Railway makes. Recurring revenue, forever, and we've paid out almost $1 million so far.
The incentives are simple: users get one-click deployments, maintainers get paid.
Following up on our Series B funding, we're joining Sentry's Open Source Pledge and committing to funding the OSS projects that both we and our community find the most useful.
We are giving away $100,000 just this quarter to tools we and our community rely on (that’s $3,704 per developer this quarter). Our first wave of sponsorships includes:
Our developer community is the backbone of everything we do; funding the tools they depend on is the obvious next step.
While funding is one piece of the puzzle, what we're building is a system where open source maintainers can actually make money from the software they build.
When you deploy open source on Railway, we aim for it to be as seamless as possible. What better way to ensure a smooth deployment than to get the recommended setup from the maintainers themselves?
Our funding opens doors to deeper partnership with the tools listed above, so our community can reap the benefits.
What started as a template marketplace is becoming something bigger: an open source ecosystem where the quality bar keeps rising.
You shouldn't have to build an entire SaaS platform to make money from your open source project.
On Railway, you can ship a template to package your software and make it deployable with one-click, while earning commission on every deployment. Up to 25% of what Railway makes, recurring, for as long as people keep running your template.
Become a Technology Partner if there are existing templates using your tool on Railway and earn commission across all of them. We rely on the software you maintain, and you should be rewarded for it. We've got 31 partners already: Prisma, Drizzle, Redis, Bun, PostHog, ComputeSDK, and more.
We’ll leave you with a promise: as long as developers run open source tooling on Railway, we will support the community and maintainers that make it possible.
