How ride-sharing company PiCap saves money and development time with Managed Databases and App Platform

PiCap is a leading ride-sharing and logistics company in Latin America, utilizing motorcycles to provide safe rides and efficient package transportation throughout crowded cities like Mexico and Brazil. By leveraging the agility of motorcycles, PiCap efficiently navigates through dense urban traffic, offering a unique and cost-effective solution to urban mobility challenges. After migrating from AWS and Heroku to DigitalOcean, they now leverage multiple DigitalOcean products, notably Managed Databases and App Platform, which saves them money and increases the scalability of their application.

A partnership based on cost savings, support, and community

PiCap’s partnership with DigitalOcean is rooted in several key benefits, including cost efficiency, ease of management, robust community support, and exceptional customer service.

“We love how easy it is to manage and how cheap it is to maintain. We also like how easy it is to scale and how great the support and communication has been with DigitalOcean,” said Andres Murcia, CTO of PiCap.

PiCap utilizes DigitalOcean’s App Platform and Managed Databases, including SQL/Postgres and MongoDB, to power their operations. The simplicity and scalability of these products have been crucial for PiCap as they launch new products and scale existing ones.

“We were previously on AWS but started migrating everything because we really love DigitalOcean in terms of cost and support. We saved a lot of money—we went from $120,000 to $30,000 [per month],” noted Andres.

To address latency issues previously experienced with AWS, PiCap integrated Redis for caching, resulting in a 20-30% performance improvement. Additionally, they have adopted DigitalOcean’s Managed OpenSearch feature to enhance address lookup functionalities in their application.

App Platform makes deployments simple

In addition to moving their databases from AWS, PiCap also moved from Heroku to DigitalOcean App Platform. With App Platform, PiCap has transitioned from 20 clusters with 100 applications on Heroku to 70 applications on DigitalOcean, managed by a single DevOps engineer. This shift has streamlined their operations and reduced overhead costs significantly.

“We started migrating all of our applications to App Platform. It was really easy to handle everything, I don’t have to be a master DevOps engineer who knows everything just to develop one application. We have around 70 App Platforms now, and it has changed the way we deploy—we have only one DevOps engineer for all of our projects.”

PiCap handles over 1.5 million rides per month, and has high traffic peaks when they have hundreds of servers running. Even at this scale, they are able to handle peaks seamlessly with a small team and leveraging App Platform. As Andres noted “We handle really high peaks, and App Platform has made the scalability seamless—App Platform is an excellent solution for startups of any size, including those like ours with very high traffic.”

Strong support and community connection

DigitalOcean’s support has been a game-changer for PiCap. The responsiveness and effectiveness of DigitalOcean’s Premium Support have ensured minimal downtime and quick resolutions to issues.

“The best support is the one you don’t have to use because everything works so great. Whenever we need to increase our servers or have questions on databases, I don’t have to wait. We had some issues with Redis recently and the team got back to me in two minutes. That decreased our downtime from maybe two hours to eighteen minutes.”

The strong community pillar DigitalOcean has also been a significant advantage for PiCap. The availability of resources have provided invaluable assistance and guidance for Andres, even before he worked at PiCap.

“I really loved that when I was a Ruby on Rails developer, most things I was searching could be found on DigitalOcean. It was great to see how DigitalOcean is committed to the community.”

Future growth plans

Looking ahead, PiCap plans to integrate AI into their applications and strategic plans, leveraging DigitalOcean’s GPU capacities and AI-enabled features. They are also exploring the implementation of Kafka to simplify processes further.

“Our plans to grow include integrating AI and exploring DigitalOcean’s GPU capacities. We also want to implement Kafka to help streamline our processes. We look forward to continuing our partnership with DigitalOcean as we scale.”

PiCap’s collaboration with DigitalOcean has transformed their operations, providing significant cost savings, improved performance, and unparalleled support. As they continue to grow and innovate, DigitalOcean remains a critical partner in their journey, offering the infrastructure and support needed to thrive in the competitive ride-sharing market.

“I can ping the DigitalOcean team quickly if I need anything, and this is something I can’t do with other cloud providers. It makes me feel like they are a real partner rather than just a vendor,” concluded Andres.