01The before
By the start of 2024, Helvetia's engineering org had grown to 84 people. Forty of them built the product. Twenty-two of them — between platform, SRE, and DevSecOps — kept production running.
The stack was the kind of thing you build when you have to. Self-hosted k8s on bare-metal in two Swiss data centers, ArgoCD, Vault, Istio, Loki, Tempo, a homegrown deploy CLI, and a 40-page runbook that began with the words "if you are reading this on a weekend, page Pavel."
The bill: CHF 1.9M / year in DC fees, licenses, and observability tools. The cost the bill didn't capture: an audit cycle that consumed six engineer-weeks every quarter, two failed compliance attestations in 2023, and a 14-month-old Postgres major-version upgrade nobody was brave enough to ship.
02The decision
Helvetia evaluated three paths in Q1 2024: stay self-hosted and double the platform team; lift-and-shift to GKE Autopilot; or move to Scalable with bring-your-own-cloud, keeping the data plane in their Zürich and Geneva regions.
Scalable won the bake-off on three things the team didn't expect to be deciding on:
- Audit inheritance. Scalable's EU-pinned data residency, signed audit log, and DPA Art. 28 dropped four full audit controls off Helvetia's matrix on day one.
- Two-click deploys. A real demo from a real product engineer (not a sales engineer) shipped a new service to two regions in 47 seconds. Helvetia's own pipeline took 23 minutes for the same shape.
- Zero rewrite. BYOC meant their existing Docker images, Postgres clusters, and Kafka topics moved as-is. No Helm to rewrite, no service mesh to relearn.
03The migration
The cutover ran six weeks, end to end, with one Scalable solutions engineer embedded part-time. Helvetia moved in waves — internal tools first, then back-office, then the patient-facing services. Production traffic shifted on a Tuesday at 03:14 CET and nobody outside engineering noticed.
04The result
Helvetia kept two SREs on platform. The other twenty engineers moved to product squads — three new product lines shipped in the year that followed, including a long-stalled patient-portal rewrite.
The bill landed at CHF 612k for the full year — a 68% drop, even after a 22% increase in compute usage. Audits are now run by a single compliance manager pulling a signed CSV from the Scalable dashboard.
05What's next
Helvetia is rolling out a new clinician-facing API to four EU regions in Q1 2026, on the same Scalable plane. The platform team is still two people. The audit is still forty minutes.