How to Offer 1-Year Free Trial With Module Locking, Multi-User, and Upgrade Billing on Railway SaaS ERP?
jerinjohn99
FREEOP

4 months ago

We are a small startup launching an ERP SaaS on the Railway Hobby plan. Our goal is to:

  • Give each new company/client a 1-year free trial of the platform.

  • Allow each client to add multiple company users (multi-user, multi-role access within their own company).

  • Implement a module locking system—e.g., HR, Operations, Inventory—so clients only unlock/pay for modules they need after the trial (each module can be locked/unlocked individually).

  • After the trial, enable self-service upgrade/billing so companies pay to unlock extra modules, and manage users/roles as needed.

  • Handle user sign-up, module unlock, user role management, and payments programmatically.

Our key technical questions:

  1. Is the Railway Hobby plan sufficient for launching this kind of multi-company, multi-user SaaS ERP with module locking/payment and user management?

  2. What is the recommended approach for implementing company-specific user and access control, module locking by company, and a 1-year timed trial logic on Railway?

  3. Any best practices or example project templates (repo links welcome) for modular SaaS architecture on Railway, especially for payments and module upgrades?

Thanks for your help!

Solved

4 Replies

Railway
BOT

4 months ago

Hey there! We've found the following might help you get unblocked faster:

If you find the answer from one of these, please let us know by solving the thread!

Status changed to Awaiting Conductor Response brody • 4 months ago

passos
MODERATOR

4 months ago

Hey,

  1. The Hobby Plan is designed for non-commercial workloads, therefore, in this case, you'll need to upgrade to the Pro Plan.

  2. If you're in the NodeJS ecosystem, I would recommend starting a multi-tenant SaaS with libraries such as Better Auth/Clerk for organization management and polar.sh for payment gateway (or Stripe).

  3. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any open-source SaaS templates that use the technologies mentioned above. However, these technologies are relatively easy to access and are well-documented.

Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • 4 months ago

passos

Hey,The Hobby Plan is designed for non-commercial workloads, therefore, in this case, you'll need to upgrade to the Pro Plan.If you're in the NodeJS ecosystem, I would recommend starting a multi-tenant SaaS with libraries such as Better Auth/Clerk for organization management and polar.sh for payment gateway (or Stripe).Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any open-source SaaS templates that use the technologies mentioned above. However, these technologies are relatively easy to access and are well-documented.

jerinjohn99
FREEOP

3 months ago

Thanks for the recommendations! I have a few follow-up questions:

  1. Managed PostgreSQL: Does Railway offer managed PostgreSQL with the Pro Plan? What's the pricing difference between unmanaged and managed databases?

  2. NDA/Confidentiality: Do you offer NDA agreements for client projects?

  3. Scalability: How easy is it to scale from the MVP setup to multiple app servers with load balancing as user load grows?

Please advise on the best approach for our commercial ERP SaaS launch on Railway.

Thanks!

Status changed to Awaiting Conductor Response Railway • 4 months ago

jerinjohn99

Thanks for the recommendations! I have a few follow-up questions:Managed PostgreSQL: Does Railway offer managed PostgreSQL with the Pro Plan? What's the pricing difference between unmanaged and managed databases?NDA/Confidentiality: Do you offer NDA agreements for client projects?Scalability: How easy is it to scale from the MVP setup to multiple app servers with load balancing as user load grows?Please advise on the best approach for our commercial ERP SaaS launch on Railway.Thanks!

passos
MODERATOR

3 months ago

  1. Railway does not offer managed databases, the PostgreSQL database available on Railway is simply a service, just like your application.

  2. Railway does not offer any kind of NDAs for Pro users. NDAs might be available on Enterprise plans, but this requires contacting the sales team.

  3. Pretty easy, Railway offers replicas (https://docs.railway.com/reference/scaling#horizontal-scaling-with-replicas) which basically create a load balancer for each replica.

Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • 3 months ago

Railway
BOT

3 months ago

This thread has been marked as solved automatically due to a lack of recent activity. Please re-open this thread or create a new one if you require further assistance. Thank you!

Status changed to Solved Railway • 3 months ago

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