One person, one platform.
slew.sh is built, hosted and supported by me — Hessel Tjeerdsma, from the Netherlands. Not a team, not a startup with a runway. One person who wanted a deploy platform that didn't need a weekend of configuration and didn't put European work on American infrastructure.
Why it exists
I kept shipping European products onto American infrastructure and kept explaining to clients why their data sat under a foreign jurisdiction. The honest answer was always "because the good tools are all over there." That stopped being a good enough answer.
The other half is simpler: most platforms make you configure something before they do anything useful. I wanted the shortest possible path from a folder or a repository to a live URL, and then I wanted to stop thinking about it. That's the whole product thesis — a deploy should take one command and no decisions.
Where the name comes from
In electronics, slew rate is how fast a signal can flip from one state to another. It's the right name for a platform whose job is to get you from "I made a thing" to "it's online" with as little in between as possible — and for one that wants switching hosts, in either direction, to be equally quick.
How it's funded
By subscriptions, and nothing else. There's no venture capital, no growth target set by somebody else, and no pressure to turn a working product into a bigger one. Your subscription pays for servers and for the time to keep improving it. That's the entire business model, and it's why I can promise early customers keep their price.
The trade-off is real and I'd rather say it than hide it: slew is smaller than the American platforms and will stay smaller. What you get for that is a platform where the person who can fix your problem is the person who reads your email, and where asking for a feature is a conversation rather than a vote.
How it's built
Deliberately boring, which for infrastructure is a compliment. The control plane is Node and Postgres behind Traefik, on a small number of Hetzner servers — no Kubernetes cluster, no microservice diagram. Boring is what one person can operate well, and boring is what stays up.
The parts that need to not be boring aren't: your builds and server apps are untrusted code from where I sit, so they run on a dedicated node under gVisor, isolated from the control plane and from each other. Platform data is backed up every six hours, encrypted, to off-site EU object storage — and I rehearse restores for real. A full recovery from backup onto a fresh machine, performed and timed, not assumed. The restore runbook is a first-class artifact here, not a wiki page written once.
What runs on it
This site, the dashboard at app.slew.cloud and the documentation all deploy on slew, through the same git push everyone else uses. If a deploy breaks, I find out because my own things break. Dogfooding isn't a policy here, it's just how it works.
Where everything lives
Servers at Hetzner in Germany, edge and DNS at Bunny in Slovenia, company incorporated in the EU. No US parent company, so no CLOUD Act exposure. There's a full comparison with Vercel and Netlify if you're weighing the move, and the privacy page lists every subprocessor.
Get in touch
Email hello@slew.sh — about the product, about a migration, or to tell me something is wrong. It reaches me directly and I answer it myself.