One product engineer, two weeks, 1,700+ domains per month

At a glance

About Railway

Railway is a cloud provider that lets developers and agents go from code to production in seconds. For Q1 2025, the team set out to let users buy and manage domains entirely through Railway — removing one of the last friction points between deploying an app and putting it on a custom domain.

The problem: Domain setup was a drop-off point

Before integrating the name.com API, custom domain setup at Railway was a multi-step, external process requiring users to leave the platform, purchase from a third party, and manually configure DNS records, which generated support tickets and friction at the configuration stage.

"If you wanted a custom domain, you would have to go to a new provider to purchase the domain, and then the whole configuration aspect — that was just a big point where people would drop off," said Jake Runzer, lead Product Engineer on the project.

Why name.com: Predictable pricing, simple integration

Railway wanted to support as many TLDs as possible from day one — no restrictions, no tiered access gates. The name.com API offered a simple integration and broad TLD coverage with transparent pricing: no per-TLD tier complexity, no application process, and no sales calls required to start reselling domains.

There was not much more that I could have asked for. name.com's cost and pricing was very predictable, so that made the decision easy.

The build: One engineer, two weeks, AI-assisted

Jake built most of the Railway domains feature on his own. He fed the name.com API documentation directly to an AI coding agent, used it to walk through the endpoints and schemas, and built from there.

"The docs are very agent friendly which allowed me to move fast," Jake said.

The API integration itself was the straightforward part. Most of the engineering time went into product decisions: designing search to work across multiple surfaces in the Railway app (including Railway's in-app AI agent), building caching layers for instant type-ahead results, and aligning subscription billing with domain renewal cycles.

Total time to launch: roughly two weeks. One week for the core integration, one week to polish the user-facing experience, and then shipped to production.

The power of in-product domains

Railway users have purchased more than 1,700 domains per month within the first quarter of rollout directly through the platform — without any dedicated marketing push. Railway passes through the cost of the domain purchase to the user, treating domains as an acquisition lever rather than a margin line.

"Some of these domains are really cheap nowadays — like $2 for the first year," Jake said. "That's nothing compared to what users are already paying Railway. One-click domain purchase is a lot less friction than going to another platform, putting in your billing details again, bringing over your DNS records.

Since launch, the team has shipped domain transfers and custom nameserver support, expanding in-product domains from a purchase feature into full domain management.

Self-serve first, human when it counts

Jake was about halfway through the build before ever talking to anyone at name.com. He found the API, created an account, and worked from the documentation. He reached out to the name.com team as launch approached.

"All of the actual implementation was fully self-serve," Jake said. "I reached out to name.com when I was setting up the reseller program — I just wanted a point of contact to make sure we were using it properly."

The name.com team recommended the Zone Check endpoint for higher-throughput availability lookups, bumped rate limits to support Railway's type-ahead search, enabled the refunds endpoint, and proactively adjusted Railway's pricing tier based on expected volume.

As the integration matured, the partnership deepened. Railway and name.com now operate with a tailored SLA, structured so that name.com absorbs the regulatory and operational complexity that comes with reselling domains at scale, and Railway's team stays focused on their product.

What this means for builders

One engineer, two weeks, 1,700+ domains per month with no marketing. Railway turned domain purchase from a drop-off point into a growth lever — because the API was simple enough to hand to an AI coding agent, the pricing was predictable enough to absorb into the product, and the partnership handled everything else.

Any platform where users deploy, publish, or launch can do the same.

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