Railway simplifies building, shipping, and monitoring applications. Here’s how we simplify their support.

Why we love Railway 

Railway is redefining the landscape of software development and deployment, eliminating the need for extensive infrastructure teams. This approach has garnered them the love and support of a huge range of customers, from individual engineers to Fortune 500 companies.

What we love about Railway – their mission aside – is their exceptional commitment to support. They share our view that support teams are not just for solving problems; they're a critical part of the feedback loop of improving the product.

How the Railway team works 

Railway's goal is to have 1 support engineer for every 1m total users. In the same way product-focused engineers might ship product features, support engineers at Railway focus on building interfaces between humans and systems to achieve this very goal. The team follows the philosophy that users should never have to reach out to support, but that when they do, it must be frictionless.

Accordingly, the entire team at Railway is part of a regular support rota. The team speaks to their customers on everything from email, Discord and Slack through to their custom-built community platform.

How Railway uses Plain

Plain provides an easy way for Railway to build a single pane of glass across all customer communications – and bring structure into the often chaotic nature of text-based communication across all their communication channels.

Before Plain, Railway's support workflow was fragmented across disconnected Discord channels and emails – it was too easy for messages to get dropped or lost. This problem got exacerbated under the pressure of rapid scale, as their user base grew several times to more than 500k over a short time span.

The team tried several other support tools before Plain, but none had the API-first architecture and developer-driven nature the team was looking for. After a brief evaluation, the team decided to adopt Plain thanks to several factors:

• It enabled them to keep all communications in a single, fast and keyboard-friendly UI

• It ensured conversations wouldn't be missed

• The product came with a robust and reliable eventing system via webhooks

• As a platform, it was incredibly easy to build on top of – it had a great developer experience with an SDK that is continually improving

All of Railway’s inbounds across email, Discord and their web form are now handled in Plain. It's “a singular place for customer questions - it can be connected to other systems via API, making it simple yet flexible” says Jake Cooper, Railway’s founder and CEO.

The Railway team has built and adopted several deep integrations over time, for example:

• Community moderators on the Railway Discord can sync entire Discord threads into Plain by simply using a /team command

• Refund requests are highly structured and show in Plain with all the relevant information needed to process a refund in seconds rather than minutes

• Slack conversations with business users are synced to, and replied to from within Plain

"For us, the net effect of Plain is that we move way faster towards our goal of making the support experience frictionless when users need support. That would have been impossible with any other solution – we're here now and not one year later because of Plain", notes Ray Chen, Support Engineer.

"We see support as more than just troubleshooting; it's a core part of our user experience and growth," Cooper adds.

Railway is poised to continue its rapid growth, and we're so excited to get to partner with their team on this journey. You can read more about how Railway uses Plain in their excellent blog posts here and here.