How Badsender is building a responsible digital trajectory with Clever Cloud
Building digital sovereignty as a trajectory, not a posture
Rather than claiming an ideal stance or a “100% sovereign” label, Badsender chose a different path: transparency. The agency publicly documents its IT stack, openly acknowledging inconsistencies and dependencies, and explaining the trade-offs behind each decision. This approach is not about claiming perfection, but about creating a compass to guide future technical choices.
Open source as the foundation of sovereignty
For Badsender, the reflection quickly went beyond the simple question of hosting providers.
We have always wanted to give back to the community that has given us so much. Publishing LePatron as open source was an obvious choice. The logical next step was to ensure the same consistency on the infrastructure side, maintaining control over hosting, complying with regulatory requirements (GDPR) and remaining mindful of our environmental impact. All while avoiding dependence on proprietary services, particularly those of GAFAM.
Olivier Fredon
Co-director and partner at Badsender
This reasoning is fully aligned with Badsender’s DNA: sharing knowledge, documenting practices, and building tools that can be reused by others. It is within this mindset that LePatron was created—an open-source email builder designed to simplify the creation of responsive emails that comply with industry best practices. One key question then remained: where should this web application be hosted in a way that is consistent with these principles?
Why Clever Cloud to host LePatron
From a technical standpoint, LePatron relies on a well-controlled architecture: a Node.js web application, a MongoDB database delivered as DBaaS, and asset hosting. Users are mainly located in Europe, but also in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region, which requires continuous service availability.
Choosing Clever Cloud was not driven by the pursuit of extreme performance, but by a precise balance:
- data hosting outside the scope of extraterritorial legislation,
- a genuinely European and independent company,
- a PaaS model that allows teams to focus on the application rather than infrastructure operations,
- and the ability to centralise the application, database and assets with a single provider.
For Badsender, Clever Cloud was selected not to “do more”, but to do things right, in line with both its values and operational constraints.
A pragmatic, prepared and well-supported PaaS migration
The migration to Clever Cloud was anticipated and prepared in advance. The main adjustments involved resource sizing and optimising performance for the specific needs of the application.
Despite the uncertainties inherent in any production deployment—particularly around real-world load—the support provided by the Clever Cloud team helped secure the transition.
The biggest unknown was sizing. Clever Cloud’s support helped us adjust quickly, without any service disruption.
Olivier Fredon
Co-director and partner at Badsender
The migration was completely transparent for LePatron users.
Centralisation, clarity and operational peace of mind
After several months in production, the benefits observed are primarily structural. Centralising the application, database and assets with a single provider has significantly simplified the team’s day-to-day operations. Logging and monitoring tools, available from the outset, proved more effective than previously used solutions.
Beyond the technical aspects, the human relationship also played a key role. Having direct access to identified contacts who understand the context of a small European organisation makes a tangible difference compared to large hyperscalers.
A technical choice that became a strong signal for the ecosystem
While end users did not experience any functional change, Badsender deliberately chose to communicate openly about the reasons behind this move: data sovereignty, environmental coherence, and alignment with an open-source vision of digital infrastructure.
This communication generated many positive responses from technical peers, partners and stakeholders within the email and responsible digital ecosystems. Choosing a sovereign cloud for web applications thus became a credibility signal, reinforcing the consistency between Badsender’s discourse and its actual practices.
Clever Cloud as an operational building block for sovereignty
For Badsender, Clever Cloud is neither a symbol nor an abstract promise. It is a concrete and coherent building block that makes it possible to apply principles often discussed only in theory: taking control of data hosting, remaining within a European legal framework, and focusing on what truly matters—the product and its use cases.
A pragmatic choice that allows the agency to keep moving forward: improving its products, supporting its clients, and continuing to challenge the practices of its industry.