Deploy and Host Tier on Railway

What is Tier?

Tier is a platform that provides an opinionated way to implement pricing and manage subscriptions, entitlements, metering, and billing in your application. It helps you avoid custom, one-off solutions by offering a single system to handle all price operations (PriceOps) and integrates with services like Stripe. Tier consists of a CLI, SDKs for different languages, and a pricing model defined in a JSON file, making it easy to adapt to your architecture and automate plan changes, user metering, and entitlement checks.

About Hosting Tier

Hosting Tier involves running its service—either self-hosted or managed—on cloud infrastructures like Railway. You deploy Tier as a Docker image, configure environment variables (such as your Stripe API key), and connect your application via Tier’s SDKs. Railway streamlines deployment, domain configuration, and scaling, allowing you to focus on your business logic. You'll need to link your Tier deployment with Stripe and manage your pricing models, which are used by the Tier service for entitlements, billing, and metering. The process is straightforward: deploy with one click, set up your env vars, sync with Stripe, and start using Tier’s features.

Common Use Cases

Automated pricing, billing, and subscription management for SaaS products
Usage metering and entitlement checks (paywalls, feature-gates, pricing plans)
Dynamic management and updates of pricing models for different customer segments

Dependencies for Tier Hosting

Docker (Tier is deployed as a Docker container)
Stripe account and API key for billing integration

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details (Optional)

Add your Stripe API key as an environment variable.
Set the TIER_BASE_URL env variable for your app to connect to Tier from its SDK.
Define pricing models in pricing.json and sync with Stripe via the CLI.

Why Deploy Tier 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.

By deploying Tier on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.