A letter to open source builders who deserve more
Blog post from Railway
Open source projects form the backbone of modern applications, but maintainers often face challenges in monetizing their work and gaining recognition. Railway aims to support these maintainers by offering an open source partner program that facilitates the growth and monetization of projects through a structured pathway. This involves creating and publishing templates on Railway's marketplace, where maintainers earn a 25% commission on deployments, and engaging with their community for feedback and improvements. Railway provides metrics and a platform for building premium versions of projects without revealing the source code, ensuring maintainers can monetize their work effectively. Despite distributing over $1 million through their template marketplace and having over 30 partners, Railway is working on enhancing their platform with better distribution, monetization, and product management features to support open source maintainers in building sustainable businesses around their projects.