Qovery

What Is Qovery?

Every engineering team that outgrows Heroku faces the same dilemma: move to raw Kubernetes and spend months building internal tooling, or pick another managed platform and accept a new form of lock-in. Qovery exists to sidestep that choice entirely. The Paris-based company, founded in 2019 by Romaric Philogene, Pierre Mavro, and Morgan Perry, provides a developer platform that wraps your existing AWS, GCP, or Azure account in a Heroku-like interface — without ever touching your application data.

The distinction matters. Unlike traditional PaaS providers that host your workloads on shared infrastructure, Qovery acts as an orchestration layer. Your containers, databases, and secrets stay inside your own cloud account. Qovery handles provisioning, deployments, and environment management on top. The result is PaaS-grade developer experience with infrastructure-grade control.

Backed by $18M in total funding — including a $13M Series A led by IRIS with participation from Datadog co-founders Olivier Pomel and Alexis Le-Quoc — Qovery has grown to serve teams that need self-service deployment without surrendering their cloud accounts to a third party.

Key Features

Deploy to Your Own Cloud

Qovery's core proposition is architectural: it provisions and manages Kubernetes clusters directly inside your AWS, GCP, or Azure account. Nothing is proxied. Your application traffic, database connections, and stored data never leave your cloud environment. For teams subject to data residency requirements — or simply unwilling to hand infrastructure control to a platform vendor — this eliminates an entire category of compliance and operational risk.

The platform handles cluster setup, networking, load balancing, and SSL certificates automatically. Most teams go from cloud credentials to a running production cluster in under 30 minutes.

Preview Environments

Qovery spins up a complete, isolated copy of your application stack for every pull request. Each preview environment gets its own URL, database, and configuration — a full replica rather than a shared staging server. When the pull request merges, the environment is destroyed and resources are released. This approach eliminates the "staging bottleneck" that slows down teams running multiple feature branches in parallel.

Infrastructure as Code

A first-party Terraform provider lets teams define their entire Qovery setup — organisations, projects, clusters, environments — as code. Combined with Git-triggered deployments via GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, this creates a fully auditable infrastructure pipeline. The open-source Rust-based deployment engine, available on GitHub, adds transparency into how Qovery manages resources under the hood.

Security and Compliance Tooling

The Enterprise tier includes fine-grained RBAC with OIDC and SAML integration, comprehensive audit logging, and a built-in secret manager. Qovery Secure bundles the configurations needed to meet SOC 2 and HIPAA standards, including network isolation and automatic TLS. These controls matter for regulated industries, though their restriction to the Enterprise plan means smaller teams must go without.

Self-Service Developer Portal

Qovery's "golden path" model gives developers a standardised way to spin up environments, deploy services, and manage configurations without filing ops tickets. Platform engineers define the guardrails; developers move freely within them. The web console, CLI, and REST API provide three access patterns for different workflows.

Pricing

Qovery restructured its pricing in 2025, simplifying from four tiers to three. The Free plan supports one cluster with up to five environments and unlimited developers — enough for a solo project or proof of concept. Preview environments are included even at this tier, which is generous.

The Team plan costs $29 per active developer per month, where "active" means anyone who pushed code or triggered a deployment in the last 30 days. This keeps costs proportional to actual usage, but it also means costs scale directly with team size. A 20-person engineering team pays $580/month for Qovery alone, before cloud infrastructure costs.

Enterprise pricing is custom and unlocks RBAC, audit logs, SSO, unlimited clusters, and dedicated support with SLAs. The gap between Team and Enterprise is significant — teams that need compliance features face a jump to custom pricing with no published intermediate option.

All plans include a 14-day refund window for new subscribers, functioning as a risk-free trial period.

EU Compliance & Privacy

Qovery operates as Birdsight SAS, a French simplified joint stock company registered in Paris (RCS 852 571 108). As a French entity, it falls under EU jurisdiction and GDPR by default. The company has achieved SOC 2 Type I certification and appointed a Security Officer who doubles as Data Protection Officer.

The platform's architecture provides a structural compliance advantage: because your workloads run in your own cloud account, Qovery never processes or stores your application data. The company handles only orchestration metadata — deployment configurations, environment definitions, user access logs. This separation means data residency is determined by your cloud account's region settings, not by Qovery's infrastructure choices.

One caveat: Qovery's own platform services may transfer some operational data outside the EU as part of their tooling stack. Their privacy policy notes that personal data may be transferred outside the European Union with appropriate safeguards. For teams requiring strict EU-only data flows, it is worth clarifying which metadata crosses borders.

Who It's Best For

Platform engineering teams building internal developer platforms who want to shortcut months of custom tooling. Qovery provides the self-service layer and environment management without requiring a dedicated platform team to build it from scratch.

Regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) where data must stay within specific cloud accounts and regions. The "deploy to your own cloud" model satisfies data sovereignty requirements that traditional PaaS cannot.

Teams migrating from Heroku who want a familiar developer experience without Salesforce's infrastructure lock-in. Qovery's migration AI agent automates parts of the transition.

Startups scaling past five engineers who need preview environments and deployment automation but cannot justify a dedicated DevOps hire. The Free and Team plans cover this use case at reasonable cost.

The Verdict

Qovery solves a genuine problem: how to give developers PaaS convenience without surrendering infrastructure control. The "deploy to your own cloud" model is its strongest differentiator, and the French headquarters plus SOC 2 certification provide a credible EU compliance story. The trade-offs are real, though — you carry cloud billing complexity that managed platforms abstract away, and Enterprise-only access to RBAC and audit logs forces growing teams into custom pricing earlier than they might like. For organisations that need their data in their own cloud accounts, those trade-offs are worth making.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Qovery GDPR compliant?

Yes. Qovery is a French company (Birdsight SAS) fully subject to EU jurisdiction. The platform holds SOC 2 Type I certification and has a designated DPO. Your application data stays in your own cloud account — Qovery handles only orchestration metadata, not customer workloads or database content.

Does Qovery store my application data?

No. Qovery deploys and manages applications on your own AWS, GCP, or Azure account. All application data, databases, and secrets remain within your cloud infrastructure. Qovery accesses your account to orchestrate deployments but does not proxy traffic or store application data on its own servers.

How does Qovery compare to Heroku?

Qovery provides a similar developer experience — git push deployments, preview environments, managed databases — but runs everything inside your own cloud account. This eliminates Heroku's infrastructure lock-in and gives you control over data residency and scaling. The trade-off is managing your own cloud billing and account setup, which Heroku abstracts away entirely.

Is there a free plan?

Yes. Qovery's Free plan includes one cluster, up to five environments, unlimited developers, and preview environments. It is limited to community support and a single cluster, but sufficient for evaluating the platform or running small projects. The Team plan at $29 per active developer per month removes these limits.

Can I use Qovery with multiple cloud providers?

Yes. Qovery supports AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. You can connect multiple cloud accounts and deploy different environments to different providers, enabling multi-cloud strategies without building separate deployment pipelines for each. The Terraform provider makes cross-cloud configuration manageable as code.