Templates Kickback Program

If you’re new around here, templates provide a one-click action to deploy open-source software on Railway without having to worry about provisioning infrastructure.

The button above links to our Metabase template which automatically deploys the Metabase Docker image along with a PostgreSQL database. That’s right — you get a full dockerized Metabase install + db just by pressing a single button.

Sounds nice, right? Here it is with a timer. It takes approximately 85 seconds.

The core idea behind templates has always been the same. If someone has solved a problem once, why should you have to solve it again?

This could be an authentication service or a job queue or an analytics solution — it doesn’t matter. As long as you require it at some point in your application’s lifecycle, we want to provide an easy way for you to build it.

Templates enable you to provision these services in a single click whether you’re starting a new project or adding them into an existing one. You can use templates as a starting point or you can use them as-is and receive automatic updates whenever the original template repository is updated.

A user telling us about a broken template

Templates sound amazing, right? Well, yes but also kinda no. While templates are great, the primary issue we’ve seen our users complain about is that they’re often outdated or even worse broken.

Technology moves very quickly which makes it difficult for us as a small team (psst, we’re hiring) to keep templates up-to-date. Community-contributed templates also suffer from this as users build templates when they need them but don’t really come back and update the original template once their app is up and running.

We get it, open-source work is sometimes thankless and sometimes suffers from lack of incentives. Sometimes people even have the nerve to complain about open source contributions when they should be showing some appreciation!

We think there’s a better path that can result in higher quality and up-to-date templates on one hand, and happier open source contributors on the other.

To solve the problems mentioned above, we’re announcing the launch of our Template Kickback program.

The Template Kickback program is now live

For any amount of money we make from a published template, we’ll kick back 25% of that amount to the template creator in the form of Railway credits!

Let’s look at a simple example:

1. A user accumulates $500 against an invoice in Railway
2. Let’s say your template accounts for $100 of that usage
3. You would receive $25 (25% of $100) in credits in your Railway account

Along with our incentivized templates program, we’re also significantly improving the template publishing flow and making it entirely self-serve by moving it to your templates page.

Simply click the publish button, fill out a few additional details and your template will be live and ready to use for all our users who visit the Template Marketplace!

Template publishing flow

Maintaining a remittance system is difficult but not impossible. As we open up this program, manual remittances will be available only for payouts totaling more than $1,000. For sums less than that, we hope you’ll enjoy Railway credits.

For answers to other frequently asked questions, be sure to check out the Templates Kickback page.

Template publishing is now open to all users in Priority Boarding. Go ahead and check out the templates we have already and see what else you’d like to add.

Meanwhile, drop by Discord to let us know any feedback on the publishing experience so we can improve it.

Thanks for your support!