How Railway Aligns Developer and Platform Incentives

Railway is shaking things up with a unique incentive: developers can now earn 25% of the revenue every time someone deploys their template through their Open Source Kickback program..

It has no minimums and no hidden fees. Developers can just create a template, publish it, and start earning.

Railway users have already created templates including:

• Better Auth: A ready-to-use authentication server.

• Pocketbase: A standalone database server written in Go.

These templates allow developers to earn passively.

Take Marc Lou’s Ship Fast, for instance. This SaaS template has generated approximately $1 million.

A developer could re-create a similar SaaS template on Railway to earn from the kickback program.

Or one can create Umami template, a privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.

Here’s the clever part: developers who struggle with marketing get free distribution, and Railway gains free labor to grow its platform. The 25% perpetual revenue-sharing ensures both sides win big.

Surfing Railway's Growth Wave For Own Gain

Railway isn’t just another platform. It helps users save money compared to big cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure.

With Railway’s rapid growth, developers can ride Railway's infrastructure wave by building once and earning forever.

It's like SaaS, but without the distribution headaches—as long as you nail the right product or, in Railway's case, the right template.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

When I posted my piece AI Girlfriends: A Billion Dollar Business? on Reddit, I got a few DMs from women.

Interestingly, they told me they liked talking to AI Boyfriends as they were more empathetic than actual men.

This trend will explode because men prefer visuals while women prefer words. An example would be how every comedian has a hot wife.

2/

Build a directory product to get free backlinks and SEO juice for your newer projects.

Google needs links from authority sources to see your site as legit. This includes social media sites.

I never understood why sites that had nothing to do with programming were creating accounts and putting links in their bio on programming-oriented sites like Dev.to but they were doing it for a reason. Just like in real-world no one would notice you are dead if you are a loner, Google won't notice you if you have no links pointing to you.

Remember, your network is equal to your net worth whether that network is in real life or in digital life.

3/

Street Interviews as a format disguises the sales process so it feels natural as an ad as the audience watching the video has their guards down due to the conversational format.

Rabbit Holes

1. How To Boost Your Learning By 89% (explained in 4 minutes) by Dr. Justin Sung

2. Pulling back the curtain on the magic of Y Combinator by Palle Broe

3. Backlink Building by Shimecki

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2. Why SaaS is the Best Business Model? (LINK)

3. Product Hunt Launch Guide (LINK)

4. The Negative Ad That Made $60k in Sales for Crayo AI (LINK)