Deploy and Host Tillkit Lite on Railway

Tillkit Lite is a free, self-hosted online store you own outright: storefront, cart, guest checkout, customer accounts, Stripe checkout (cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay), pay by invoice, sales tax at checkout and an admin for products and orders. Plain Node.js with one dependency, and no monthly platform fee.

About Hosting Tillkit Lite

This template deploys two services: the Tillkit Lite web store from its public GitHub repository, and a Postgres database it uses for products, orders, accounts and uploaded photos. You set an admin email and password at deploy; the admin account is created on first start. Add your Stripe secret key and webhook secret (test keys work), then point a Stripe webhook at /webhooks/stripe on your domain. Edit store.config.js in your copy of the repo for your name, theme, colors and policies, and push to redeploy. A small store fits Railway's Hobby plan.

Common Use Cases

Running a small online shop without a monthly platform fee
Selling physical products with sales tax, stock tracking and order emails
A starter store you change yourself or with an AI coding assistant (it ships with a CLAUDE.md and tests)

Dependencies for Tillkit Lite Hosting

Postgres (included in this template)
A Stripe account for card payments; Resend (optional) for order emails

Implementation Details

Node 20, no framework; the only dependency is pg. Money is stored as integer cents and checkout re-prices every line on the server. Tillkit Full (https://tillkit.shop) adds inventory from supplier invoices, reorder planning, profit and tax reports and five more themes.

Why Deploy Tillkit Lite 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 Tillkit Lite 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.