Stepler cuts costs by 78% and gains peace of mind with Sevalla
Biggest wins with Sevalla
- 78% reduction in infrastructure costs (saving over $2,300 every month)
- Zero worries about uptime, scaling, or DevOps maintenance
- Seamless migration from GKE with minimal downtime
- PR builds, analytics, and API tools that empower both developers and non-technical staff
Stepler is a health app on a mission to inspire people to walk more and live healthier lives. Users earn points for every step they take and can redeem them for rewards or even cash payouts.
With a growing global audience and a gamified approach to wellness, Stepler turns something as simple as walking into a rewarding lifestyle habit.
Our mission is simple: to inspire people to walk more, stay active, and enjoy the benefits of a healthier lifestyle — while being rewarded along the way.
The challenge
Jorik Kraaikamp Mulder, Lead Backend Developer at Stepler, explained that the company originally ran its application on Google Cloud Platform’s GKE, supported by Cloudflare Pages and additional DDoS protection.
While effective, the setup relied on consultants for building and maintenance. When Stepler’s backend team took over, the problem became clear:
The infrastructure worked, but maintaining it took too much time, expertise, and focus away from building new features. So, we started exploring alternatives where we are no longer directly responsible for managing the infrastructure layer.
Some of these alternatives include Google Cloud Run, Scaleway, Railway, and Fly.io. However, most lacked critical features such as background process support or forced them to stitch multiple services together.
This left us with two strong candidates: Railway and Sevalla.
After a closer look at their features and pricing models, Sevalla proved to be the better fit with:
- Transparent, predictable pricing
- Same stack they were already familiar with (GKE + Cloudflare)
- Full infrastructure layer without piecemeal solutions
The solution
To minimize disruption, Stepler rolled out migration in carefully planned stages:
- The team first migrated its React-based admin panel to Sevalla’s static sites, and it worked flawlessly.
- Cron jobs and background processes were then deployed in staging and tested with PR builds.
- The team migrated services one by one, tested them internally, and released them gradually to users through mobile app redirects.
- After user validation, the team switched the main URL over with only a few minutes of downtime.
The team ported the entire app to Sevalla in a single day, compared to the three months it originally took to set up on GKE.
I was able to port our entire application to Sevalla in just a single day. By comparison, setting everything up on GKE originally took us around three months, largely due to the steep learning curve of the tools involved.
With Sevalla, the migration process was straightforward and intuitive, allowing us to move everything over directly. Their platform has significantly simplified our infrastructure management.
Features that made the difference
Stepler’s team highlights several Sevalla features that changed the way they work:
- PR builds that automatically rebuilt staging environments
- Built-in analytics for clear performance monitoring
- Powerful yet simple UI for quick changes
- Flexible API that supports automation and a companion mobile app for non-technical staff
- Responsive support and rapid feature requests (Sevalla increased instance scaling limits and added time zone support for cron jobs within weeks)
The results
We achieved a 100% success rate in meeting our primary goal: no longer having to worry about infrastructure. Even with just this outcome, we would have considered the migration a success.
Monthly hosting costs dropped from nearly $3K to just $650
Since switching to Sevalla, Stepler has reduced their monthly infrastructure costs by 78%, cutting expenses from nearly $3,000 down to just $650 without sacrificing performance.
- Production costs dropped from $1,900 to $380.
- Staging costs fell from $636 to $100.
- Dev/PR environments went from $424 to only $20.
Despite this dramatic reduction, Stepler’s performance didn’t regress at all. Every service ran as smoothly as before, but at a fraction of the cost.
Peace of mind
Even more valuable than the savings was the peace of mind. With Sevalla handling the infrastructure layer, the development team no longer worries about uptime or maintenance.
My main concern used to be infrastructure maintenance. With Sevalla, I don’t have to worry about that at all. I can focus entirely on development.
Conclusion
With Sevalla, Stepler has transformed the way it manages its applications. Instead of spending time on DevOps and infrastructure issues, the team can now focus on building new features, improving the user experience, and growing their community.
With Sevalla, you no longer need to worry about uptime or managing infrastructure — it simply works. If I were to start a new project today, I would choose Sevalla from the very beginning.