We’re taking the first step to introducing currency exchange on the Railway platform

We’re previewing real-time “multiplayer” infrastructure collaboration

We’re introducing a number of other improvements 

Since that’s a lot of stuff, would you mind if we trim the intro down a bit? 

It’s now possible to send Railway credits to another Railway user

Today we’re introducing a new way to send credits to other users on Railway. 

First we’ll show you how it works, then we’ll explain what it means. 

), you’ll now see a magic little button that reads 

When clicked, this button will bring up a modal to execute a transaction. 

In this case, let’s say thanks to Community Engineer Matt (who wrote this feature) and pass him $10 in credits — 

As the sender, the credits are levied against your existing credits and you’ll be billed on the spot if you exceed your current credit balance. 

As the receiver, you’ll notice new credits in your account that you can use to pay Railway invoices.

Let’s talk about WHY we’re shipping this. 

 (40% month over month last we checked!) and we’re racing to build the primitives to allow template creators to cash out. This is another step forward in laying the groundwork for a real economy to be built on Railway where template developers will be able to generate real income. To get there we need a mechanism for transferring funds and this is a super early version of that.

The second reason is that we wanted to provide an easier way for administrators to distribute Railway credits to a group — think hackathon organizers, educators, and so forth. So this accomplishes that as well. 

So with that said, we invite you to visit the public profile page for any 

 that’s made a template you enjoy and send them a few credits to say thanks. 

Behind the scenes look at realtime collaboration or “multiplayer” functionality coming to the Railway canvas

This is a really early preview — but sometimes we just can’t wait to show you something. This is exactly one of those times.

Note: If you’d like to skip ahead, the news is that you now get an early version of multiplayer as part of the 

“Multiplayer” or “realtime collaboration” has had quite the moment in the sun in our industry for a number of years now. As something that straddles the line between “software feature” and “category-defining software feature,” multiplayer is a key contributor to the popularity of applications like 

 as it’s brought new collaborative life to old paradigms.

But while multiplayer has arrived for front office applications, it hasn’t really made its way to infrastructure — at least not yet.

Imagine your application’s just gone down and you’re debugging in the Railway dashboard. Shouldn’t the dashboard provide the same level of collaborative context as your document editor? Wouldn’t it be a better development environment to feel the presence of your team when you’re working together on something? We think so. 

So with that in mind, today we’re showing an early preview of multiplayer or realtime collaboration in the canvas as well as introducing a few other improvements related to service groups.

Realtime groups and positions are now synced for everyone on the project

There’s a new "Reset Canvas" command (cmd+k) to remove all groups and nodes in case things get funky

Click on services names when the group is collapsed to open them

Help Center posts now support attachments 

This is great news for sharing screenshots, logs, and whatever else you might need to communicate better with the community and Railway Support Engineers.

We’re blitzing through a bunch of improvements to the Help Center and as always would love your feedback — so please 

 how we can make the Help Center work better for you!

 button to the modal of crashed deployments

We added a number of small stylistic improvements to the Help Center

We fixed some issues with template icons and OGs rendering correctly

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1709954250/2024-0308_ytrdks.png

Credit Transfers, Multiplayer Preview, Attachments in Help Center

Changelog #0176