GIT PUSH && GET PAID: How to Make Money on Railway

The Template Kickback program now pays template creators cash in $100 - $500 increments

Railway loves open source software. We love the way it brings our community together. We love the way it propels our industry forward. And we love the way it helps companies scale and succeed on our platform.

Last year we launched our Template Kickback program. This let our users publish “templates” and then accrue a 25% kickback on each template’s usage across the platform.

To date we’ve paid out nearly forty-thousand dollars.

And as Railway sees record adoption, we’ve seen Template Kickbacks start to compound fast (were talking north of 30% month over month growth). In fact, we already have some template authors who have accrued over ten-thousand dollars in kickbacks. For them, Railway Templates have become a legitimate source of revenue.

All this growth makes the team very happy. So now we’re taking things a step further.

Railway users can now exchange their template kickback earnings for U.S. Dollars.

That’s right. 25% cash back for every dollar of compute that your template generates across our platform. No limits. No gotchas. Just cold, hard cash. Fiat, baby.

Make it rain 💸.

Whether you run an org that builds OSS products or you’re an indie hacker working inside the OSS-ecosystem, there’s a way for you to earn money and run your code for free using Railway Templates.

All you need to get started is a Railway Account. Then, follow these three steps:

Right now the primary way you earn cash on Railway is through our Template Kickback program. Here are some ideas:

• Publish your org’s OS software
• Publish all your favorite OSS tools
• Build entire infrastructure models that anyone can deploy / bootstrap

If you want to templatize an OSS product that you don’t personally maintain, first search our template marketplace. If the template you want to build already exists and has a high success rate, you should build a different template. If not, make sure you meaningfully improve or otherwise differentiate your template from the existing one.

Visit your account settings and click on the Earnings link in the sidebar. By default, your template kickbacks are automatically transferred into Railway Credits. This reserve of credits is then used to pay off any outstanding balances on your future invoices. You can also send these credits to other users.

To begin earning cash payouts, turn off the switch that says Direct Deposit to Railway Credits. This will opt you out of the old distribution system. Now add a withdrawal platform. We currently accept withdrawal requests to BuyMeACoffee and GitHub Sponsors. We are, however, seeing growing interest in adding a more direct method. If that excites you, upvote and comment on the feature request here to add Stripe Connect.

Watch as that sweet cash starts rolling in. You can withdraw to credits at any time, and you can return to the old Direct Deposit model too. There is a 100 dollar minimum for cash withdrawals.

The Railway team is so excited to launch this next phase of our Template Marketplace.

So go ahead open-sourcers and keep doing your thing. Keep publishing your apps, your models, and even your entire tech stacks as Railway Templates. Then sit back, relax, and enjoy that extra cash. Because now you can turn those earnings into anything you want, from free-compute to fro-yo.

Or heck — even both at the same time 🍦💾.

— Railway

• Railway Templates Library
• Template Kickback Program
• How to Create a Template docs
• Template Composer
• Earnings and Withdrawals docs
• Link to your account templates

For feedback on this program, please join the conversation here.