Deploy and Host Railhead on Railway

Railhead is a batteries-included SaaS starter: Next.js, Postgres, Better Auth, Stripe billing, Resend email, and a Redis-backed worker, wired together and ready to deploy. Most "SaaS starter" templates stop at auth and a database — Railhead goes the rest of the way, because Stripe Checkout and webhooks, transactional email, and a real background worker are the parts everyone rebuilds from scratch and nobody wants to.

About Hosting Railhead

This template deploys two Railway services (a Next.js app and a BullMQ worker) plus a Postgres and a Redis plugin, wired together with reference variables. The web service handles the UI, Better Auth sign-up/sign-in, and Stripe Checkout; the worker service is a dedicated, no-public-port BullMQ consumer that sends transactional email and processes Stripe webhook events asynchronously, so a webhook is always acknowledged inside Stripe's 5-second window regardless of downstream load.

Why Deploy Railhead on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it. Deploying Railhead on Railway means every piece — the app, the worker, Postgres, and Redis — lives on one dashboard with private networking between them already wired in, and the worker service runs as a genuine long-lived process, which is the one thing a serverless/Vercel-style starter can't one-click.

Common Use Cases

Launching a subscription SaaS product without rebuilding auth and billing from scratch.
A starting point for an indie developer or small team who wants Stripe Checkout and a background worker wired in from day one.
A reference implementation of "ack fast, process async" for Stripe webhooks, worth reading even if you don't deploy it.

Dependencies for Railhead Hosting

A Stripe account (test or live) for STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET, and the two price IDs.
A Resend account for RESEND_API_KEY and a verified RESEND_FROM_EMAIL.

Both are optional at deploy time — the template boots without them — but sign-up and checkout need them filled in to actually work.

Deployment Dependencies

Next.js 15 (App Router)
Drizzle ORM on Postgres
Better Auth
Stripe Checkout + webhooks
Resend + React Email
BullMQ on Redis

Full architecture, data model, and the system design document behind these decisions live in the GitHub repo. Railhead is free and open source under LGPL-3.0 — fork it and build a proprietary product on top; only changes to Railhead itself need to stay open.