A letter to open source builders who deserve more

Every modern application is built on layers of open source tooling - from Drizzle, to Redis, to n8n, to more recently OpenClaw - the list goes on.

Behind every open source project is a person who maintains it by shipping improvements, answering issues, and distributing it. This is a letter to those builders and how Railway can support you.

As an open source maintainer, you have a few options to monetize: Github sponsorships, tangential consulting work, or diving all-in and building a venture-backed company. For those that want to stay independent and want their tool and community to speak for itself, the path is less clear. This is what we are trying to solve at Railway.

The open source partner program is built for maintainers who want to grow their project and build a business around it on Railway. Not just monetization, but true product management.

Here's what the path looks like in practice from open source popularity to monetization on Railway:

Publish a template. Create a template on Railway so users can deploy your open source project with one-click, and publish it to our marketplace with best practices in mind. We’ll verify it as the suggested approach for users searching for your tool.

Grow your earnings. The best templates are ones that are heavily demanded - point your community towards the Railway template. On every deployment, earn 25% commission - forever. As Railway grows 15% MoM, your template should too.

Interact with your community. Questions and issues from Railway users reported directly in your template queue in Central Station. Incorporate the feedback back into your project to make it better, monetize even more.

Anonymous metrics. Open source partners can see metrics for your templates and earnings.

Build a premium version, without the management overhead. With a private image accessible to you, create a template for any Railway user to deploy this image, without exposing the source to them. You ensure every deploy of that image is monetized with commission on Railway, not just for a percentage of those that choose to deploy on Railway.

To build a business around open source, you're probably focused on a few things:

• Making it easier for users to package and run your tooling
• Revenue that's tied to adoption, increasing as your community grows
• A direct feedback loop with the people actually running your software
• Visibility into how your project is being used in production
• A path to a premium version, without building a cloud product from scratch

These are precisely the pieces Railway is aiming to make easier, keeping you independent and not relying on external sponsorships or an influx of money to support you and your project. The money should come from organic community growth and project usage.

Commission and community interaction are available today. Earn 25% commission through Railway verified partner templates, and improve your product through community support and metrics we expose to you. We have paid out over $1M through our template marketplace over the years, and have over 30 partners who joined the program since September.

However, what we have today is not where we need to be. What we have planned:

• Template marketplace makeover, where we play a bigger role in your distribution and monetization efforts. A clearer template experience for deploying users, and a clearer path to revenue for you.
• Enabling product management in Central Station, where you not only answer user questions, but have insights into opportunities to make your project better end to end.

We're on this journey and we want you along for it. Railway is continuing to give back to open source, growing 15% MoM, and building toward a platform where the people who maintain the tools everyone depends on can make a real living doing it.

Become an open source partner at railway.com/partners and see what you can do on Railway.

Publish a template, point users to it, support your community, and monetize.