Case Study: Propeller Digital achieves rapid, scalable eCommerce backend migration with Render

How eCommerce agency Propeller Digital moved off SaaS, to self-host on Render—in 1 week

Propeller Digital is a globally distributed eCommerce agency that had a client site with surging demand, reaching up to 30 orders per second. Their hosted SaaS backend, Swell, couldn’t keep up and was dropping orders, putting the client’s revenue at risk. The team needed a faster, more flexible way to support complex ticketing and high-traffic checkout flows.

Using Render, Propeller Digital migrated to a self-hosted Medusa.js backend in just one week, with the stack running on Render’s web services, Redis, background workers, and managed PostgreSQL. They moved 160k users, completed the final cutover in about 45 minutes of downtime, and stabilized the site so it could autoscale under heavy load. The result was a more controllable architecture, less than an hour of downtime, and a path to lower costs by replacing expensive SaaS components with infrastructure on Render.

Propeller Digital

Oliver Burke

Co-founder