Superscript is building the infrastructure layer for modern insurance. Founded in 2016, the digital broker serves thousands of small and medium enterprise customers across 19 trades, processing 50,000 HTTP requests and 250,000 jobs every day. When the team decided to move off Heroku, they needed a platform that could match their vision: secure, programmable, and built for the long haul.
Their choice fell on Laravel Private Cloud, and only one month in, they're already saving 30% on infrastructure costs, and are on track for saving 50% as they move more environments to dedicated compute. All while getting the security and compliance they see as standard for their apps.
If you’re thinking about migrating from Heroku to Laravel Cloud, check our migration guide.
Why Superscript Left Heroku
Superscript has been running Laravel for years, but hosting on Heroku came with a growing list of workarounds.
Their biggest headache was preview environments. With a monorepo housing five Laravel applications, spinning up a preview environment meant manually downloading the repo, reorganizing files, repackaging it, and uploading it to fit Heroku's expected structure.
"Usually it would work fine," said Erik Gaal, Staff Engineer at Superscript. "But when it did fail, usually this was with the preview environments. You would have meetings with five engineers trying to decipher what Heroku was doing."
Monitoring was another friction point. Getting Datadog set up required custom buildpacks. Environment variable changes triggered full builds and visibility into app performance was limited.
Superscript had already been evaluating alternatives when Heroku announced they would no longer sign new enterprise contracts. The timing made the decision easy.
“I think the transition from Heroku to Laravel Cloud is all about trying to be much more efficient. It’s not about looking at the decisions that we made in the past but instead looking at the tools and partners we have, how we’re mapped today against our vision, and how we’re mapped against our technology strategy,” said Colin Bradford, Chief Operating Officer at Superscript.
What Drew Superscript to Laravel Cloud
The Superscript team was already building on the Laravel framework, so Cloud was a natural fit. Two features sealed the deal:
- The first was hibernation. Preview environments were expensive to keep running on Heroku. Cloud's ability to hibernate idle environments meant Superscript could keep their development workflow intact without paying for compute that wasn't doing anything.
- The second was the promise of a platform built to grow with them. As more first-party products come online, including queue clusters and deeper AI tooling, the value of running on a Laravel-native platform compounds. That, combined with the security capabilities of Laravel Private Cloud, made the decision clear.
Private Cloud: Enterprise Security Without the Overhead
Superscript operates in financial services, where security requirements are non-negotiable. They needed ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications, as well as private networking between their software layers.
Laravel Private Cloud provides isolated, dedicated infrastructure designed for exactly these requirements. For Superscript, it meant moving from Heroku to a platform with the same security perimeter they relied on, without having to build and maintain it themselves.
"The ability to have the private networking aspect could have become a deal breaker for us," said Colin Bradford, Chief Operating Officer at Superscript. "We effectively rely upon using that perimeter to be able to secure all the interactions between our software layers."
Cloud exceeded their expectations on certification. The private networking requirement was met out of the box. And MFA plus Google Workspace login gave the team the access controls they needed to get comfortable quickly.
Migrating Five Laravel Apps to Laravel Private Cloud
The team migrated five Laravel applications. Four smaller ones took a couple of hours each, following a straightforward playbook: shut down the old environment, run Postgres dump and restore commands, switch DNS. Their largest application, with an 80 GB database, took around six hours, mostly due to the data transfer.
One minor issue surfaced during a rehearsal run: a table didn't restore correctly because some tables were left over from the first attempt. The team caught it, cleaned it up, and completed the migration without incident.
"It was all Postgres to Postgres," said Craig Morris, Technical Program Manager at Superscript, "so it was all pretty seamless."
Erik moved two of the five apps himself. One was stateless, so very simple to migrate: connect the Git repo, deploy, check, update DNS. Done in five minutes. "Laravel Cloud’s interface is like 20 times faster and it's quite easy to navigate," he said.
Laravel Cloud Features That Changed How Superscript Builds
The most immediate quality-of-life improvement was the tight Laravel integration:
- Database and cache configuration flows automatically into environment variables.
- Queues and scheduled work are enabled with checkboxes.
- Multiple processes run on the same compute instance, which on Heroku would have meant paying for each process separately.
Superscript processes 250,000 jobs per day. The ability to share databases and caches across apps in preview environments, rather than spinning up a new cluster per environment, was another welcome change.
"That design is probably really smart," Craig said, "because we were just burning money spinning up new database clusters for every review environment when it's just not needed."
Laravel Nightwatch integration was another standout. Where Datadog on Heroku required custom buildpacks, Nightwatch required a button click.
The team also uses Laravel Boost across nearly all of their applications, and plans to use the AI SDK to address a persistent pain point in insurance: rekeying data across systems.
As for desired features, they’d like to have more granular role-based access, to prevent developer accidents like a delete app.
30% Cost Savings in Month One
In their first month on Laravel Cloud, Superscript saved 30% on infrastructure costs. They expect that number to reach 50% as they migrate more environments to dedicated compute.
For Craig, the platform choice is about more than the current savings. "We are building the insurance layer of the internet, and we needed a platform heading in that same direction. Laravel Cloud provides the programmable, seamless infrastructure that mirrors our own ambition, allowing us to slash our spend by 50% and shift our focus from managing servers to building the future of insurance."
You too can start saving with Laravel Cloud today. For all of the flexibility and power of Cloud while running applications in an isolated cluster with dedicated nodes and pods for maximum privacy, compliance, and security, check Private Cloud.
If you’re thinking about migrating from Heroku to Laravel Cloud, check our migration guide.