Marketcircle is a customer relationship management (CRM) software provider dedicated to helping small businesses manage everything from customer management to project management and sales engagement. The company has evolved a lot since its inception—eventually into a cloud-native application.

“One of the things that we do differently from most of our competitors is that we provide a proper cloud-native application with local data. It’s becoming more of a trend to have local data. But we have had this for years now, and we synchronize the data from your device to our servers,” CEO Alykhan Jetha explains.

Marketcircle’s application, Daylite, is designed to support multiple devices and users across a company. It’s also intended to synchronize in the background, even if the user is offline. This meant the team had specific technical use cases for its selected cloud provider.

Before moving to the cloud, Marketcircle’s infrastructure was self-hosted in a data center, which required extensive manual management and was costly to run. It also wasn’t sustainable if the team wanted to shift to a cloud-based application. They knew they needed a cloud provider that could fully support local data synchronization, effectively scale resources, provide development flexibility, and do so within budget.

Why Marketcircle chose DigitalOcean

Limited vendor lock-in

The main reason Marketcircle chose DigitalOcean was the minimal vendor lock-in. This felt especially important to the team, as business and application needs have pivoted in the past, and they wanted to ensure they could do it again if needed.

“We felt that if we went with one of the bigger providers at the time, it was easy for us to fall into a situation where we would get locked into that vendor, and, business risk management-wise, that didn’t seem smart to me,” Alykahn says.

DigitalOcean’s offerings are based on industry-standard technologies, which facilitates portability. Droplets are standard Linux VMs, Managed Databases use popular engines like MySQL and PostgreSQL, and Spaces use an S3-compatible API. With open-source technology built in, it’s much easier for companies to configure their infrastructure as needed to reflect business requirements.

Pricing transparency

The other supporting factor of Marketcircle choosing DigitalOcean was its clear, transparent pricing policy.

“These other providers, you look at the bill, and you don’t know where you spent the money. But, with DigitalOcean, it’s much easier to kind of understand where you’re spending your money. Generally speaking, cost-wise, I estimate we’re saving at least a third, to maybe a half, as if we were to go with another cloud provider,” says Alykahn.

This transparency extends across DigitalOcean’s product line. Managed databases, Kubernetes clusters, and load balancers all have fixed plan prices or straightforward per-hour rates. Customers can also easily calculate potential costs to avoid confusion or surprise when the invoice appears in their inbox.

Finding time savings, consistent support, and reliability

Marketcircle started on its DigitalOcean journey with Droplets and Volumes Block Storage. Both companies have continued to expand their offerings, and Marketcircle now uses:

• Droplets: Linux-based virtual machines that can spin up in seconds and come with a 99.99% SLA.

• Managed Kubernetes: High-availability Kubernetes deployments that simplify orchestration and support scalability.

• Volumes Block Storage: Support demanding, business-critical applications that require high throughput.

• Managed Databases: DigitalOcean database administration for MongoDB, Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and OpenSearch.

These products help Marketcircle run smoothly and make it easier for the development team to keep its infrastructure in check. They also help reduce the amount of time developers need to spend on specific tasks, making their jobs easier.

“When you look at the simplicity that DigitalOcean’s UI offers versus a different provider, it’s drastically different. You’ve got digital simplicity [compared to other providers], so you get that time savings when you’re just trying to provision a resource or understand the cost of a resource. So there’s that time savings as well,” explains Adam Tharani, platform developer at Marketcircle.

Paired with these technologies, of course, is DigitalOcean’s customer support staff to keep everything running smoothly and help Marketcircle evolve. Alykahn says they’ve always been able to adjust and adopt new features as they are released and get the technology support they need.

He’s also acknowledged high availability and minimal downtime with DigitalOcean. “We haven’t had many outages. It’s been pretty rock steady all these years. When I look at other providers or other companies, for example, they have more outages than us. I don’t know if it’s the companies or the providers. But I do know that for us, it’s a rare situation for our outage to be a DigitalOcean one. It’s been rare in the last five years,” Alykhan notes.

Evolving with DigitalOcean

As Marketcircle continues to grow and maintain its platform, Alykhan and his team always look at what’s next and what features they can add to better serve the customer base.

This includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The Marketcircle team is evaluating the technology as it continues to focus on its customers, who are small business owners.

“At the moment, what comforts me is that DigitalOcean is starting to offer AI/ML options. We haven’t quite figured out how exactly we’ll leverage it, but the fact that they’re there gives me comfort. In terms of our company vision, our prime objective is still the small business customer, and we plan to double down on that,” Alykhan says.

But Alykhan and the Marketcircle team know that whenever they decide to adopt AI/ML into their tech stack, DigitalOcean will be there to provide support and expertise.