Case Study: SwimTopia achieves seamless peak-season scalability with Heroku

SwimTopia Scales Seamlessly on Heroku During Peak Season

SwimTopia (Team Topia), founded by Mason Hale in Austin, TX, builds swim-team management software to simplify registration, volunteer coordination, meet operations and communications. The company outgrew an antiquated Access database and a basic VPS-hosted PHP site as parent-driven, seasonal swim meets created chaotic, last-minute changes and huge traffic spikes—usage climbs roughly 10x during summer weekends—so SwimTopia needed a cloud platform that could scale reliably and reduce operational overhead.

Team Topia rebuilt on Heroku, using Heroku Postgres, worker dynos with Redis and Sidekiq, and add‑ons like Rails Autoscale, Librato and Rollbar to automate scaling, monitor performance and handle background jobs. The managed platform and responsive support let the small team avoid hiring a DevOps engineer, recover quickly from incidents, and deliver new products (mobile app, Meet Maestro) while reliably serving over 1,000 teams and handling intense summertime traffic.

SwimTopia

Mason Hale

Founder & CEO