From Heroku to Scalingo:
How Yespark Transitioned to Digital Sovereignty with a French PaaS

What Scalingo delivered ⤵️

• Data Hosting in France : A sovereign solution compliant with European standards.
• Seamless Migration from Heroku : Automatic updates deployed in just a few clicks.
• Responsive and Personalized Support: : Direct answers from engineers with no generic messages.

The Results for Yespark 📈

• Data Sovereignty Compliance : Secure hosting of data within Europe.
• Enhanced Performance : Fast, uninterrupted deployment of new features.
• Cost Savings : A competitive solution with slightly lower costs compared to Heroku.

Background and Initial Challenge

Ten years ago, Yespark set out to revolutionize urban parking for residents in major French cities.

The company began by offering car parking solutions, enabling users to locate partner parking spaces in their neighborhoods and open gates via a mobile app. As urban mobility evolved, Yespark expanded its services to include bike parking, EV charging stations, and logistics hubs for cycling deliveries.

This rapid growth brought an increasing need to address data sovereignty requirements, especially as tenders increasingly demanded European data hosting.

Scaling Innovation with Yespark’s CTO.

Guillaume Wrobel, Yespark’s CTO and co-founder, has guided the company’s growth from a team of just three to today’s 80 employees. As CTO, Guillaume oversees the development of user-focused features and makes key architectural decisions to ensure the platform’s stability.

In 2020, he decided it was time for a change in hosting solutions.

The Transition from Heroku to Scalingo

Initially, Yespark relied on Heroku, a well-established American PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider. However, data sovereignty became a pressing issue. As Guillaume recalls: Guillaume se souvient : "We were GDPR-compliant, but hosting our data in the US was problematic for our European clients."

Discovering Scalingo, a French alternative to Heroku, came at just the right moment. Guillaume first heard about Scalingo during the pandemic while working on the Covidliste project. I saw that Scalingo offered a very similar solution to Heroku, with the added benefit of being a French provider. It was exactly what we needed to host our data in France."

Simplified DevOps with Scalingo

Yespark’s migration to Scalingo was both a strategic and technical win."What’s great about Scalingo is its simplicity: I click and forget. We deploy updates several times a day, and our users get the new features instantly," explains Guillaume.

Scalingo’s seamless integration with GitHub automatically compiles and deploys every new version to their servers. Another crucial factor for Guillaume was the quality of support.

"From the start, we had excellent contact with Scalingo’s support team. Unlike other providers, their engineers respond directly—no generic messages. This helped us fine-tune our dynos and optimize both performance and costs."

Results and Outlook

Since migrating to Scalingo, Yespark has successfully met data sovereignty requirements while benefiting from a robust platform and responsive support."We haven’t noticed any performance drop, and we feel confident about managing our infrastructure," Guillaume confirms.

On top of that, Yespark found the costs to be competitive."The costs are comparable, even slightly lower than Heroku’s. It’s very reasonable considering the peace of mind it brings."

Conclusion

Yespark is a prime example of how a French startup can transition to a sovereign cloud infrastructure without compromising service quality. For developers seeking a European alternative to Heroku, Scalingo stands out as a reliable, user-friendly solution backed by superior technical support.

As Guillaume puts it: "With Scalingo, we get all the features we loved about Heroku, plus the advantage of keeping our data in France."