Case Study: Smile.io achieves faster development, seamless scalability, and greater confidence with Heroku

Loyalty Service Migrates from AWS to Heroku, Giving Developers Speed, Scalability, and Confidence

Smile.io, founded by a group of Waterloo undergrads, builds a white‑labeled points and rewards app that helps e-commerce brands boost repeat purchases and lifetime value. After launching on AWS, the team needed dedicated DevOps and later an external operations partner, but as deployments grew to weekly or daily cadence they lost visibility and control—making releases slow and operational complexity a bottleneck.

Smile.io moved its entire stack to Heroku—Rails API, Ember front end, and MySQL → Heroku Postgres—and adopted Heroku Add‑ons for logging, monitoring, caching, and SSL. The switch delivered one‑click integrations, better developer control, seamless scaling for traffic spikes (handling 150k requests/hour on Cyber Monday), and the confidence to deploy daily, speeding product development and improving reliability.

Smile.io

Bill Curtis

Co-Founder & CTO