Case Study: UrbanBound simplifies employee relocation and scales securely with Heroku

Heroku App Makes Relocation Management Easier for Employees and HR Staff

UrbanBound is a Chicago-based startup (founded 2011) that delivers a comprehensive web and mobile relocation platform to help employees and HR teams manage moves. Faced with the complexity of finding housing, coordinating local services, handling budgets and tax implications, and delivering city-specific guidance, companies needed a self-service, mobile-friendly tool that still offered live support when issues arose.

UrbanBound built a React front end with a Rails back end on the Heroku PaaS (using Heroku Postgres and add-ons like Mandrill, MemCachier, New Relic and Papertrail) so the team could focus on product rather than server ops. The result is a scalable, secure platform that streamlines planning, vendor connections, and task management for employees, reduces HR workload, and has been adopted by more than 100 Fortune 1000 customers — helping clients like Yelp increase out-of-state hires while easing recruiter effort.

UrbanBound

John Wood

Lead Developer, UrbanBound