Case: Pay2Wash

In the beginning of 2017 Pay2Wash was founded by the company Van de Weijer Laundry. Van de Weijer Laundry is a company that manages various Laundromats in the region of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The company started to build their own software for managing Laundromats due to the lack of reliable partners to work with. Now, 2021, Pay2Wash is deployed in nearly 50 locations in both The Netherlands and recently also Germany for a wide variety of tenants. The number of locations is growing on a rapid speed.

With Pay2Wash users who share facilities (for example, student houses, short-stay apartments and short-stay Lofts) are able to easily manage their washing with the Pay2Wash-app. They are able to top-up their wallet and pay from the app for specific programs of washing machines and dyers. Once a program is paid, the machine is started over a secure network from the Pay2Wash infrastructure at Cloudbear to the on-site infrastructure at the Laundromat of the machine. After a program is finished, the users will receive a notification on their phone - so they do not need to wait any longer or check if the program is finished continuously.

In the beginning of 2020 Pay2Wash and Cloudbear teamed up to make the Pay2Wash application even more reliable and to create the Continuous Deployment procedures for Pay2Wash. This resulted in Cloudbear providing Pay2Wash with a couple of managed services, including:

• Managed Kubernetes, for scaling the application.
• Managed redundant VPN, for the secure connections to the on-site Laundromats.
• Managed redundant MySQL, for a fast, secure and reliable database.
• Managed Loadbalancer, as required by Kubernetes to be able to scale.
• Managed Object Storage, for hosting uploaded files through the application.
• Managed Mail, for sending e-mails from the application.
• Managed Monitoring, where monitoring is fully handled by Cloudbear and issues are proactively dealt with.
• Managed Pipeline, where Cloudbear manages the Continuous Deployment pipeline.
• 24/7 SLA, where Cloudbear will proactively respond 24/7 to priority issues.
• Cloudbear on your Slack, where a Shared Channel in Slack is used to improve communication.

For this interview, we had a conversation with Enzo Verhoeven, hardware developer and board member at Pay2Wash.

What kind of services do you provide with Pay2Wash?

We supply complete laundered automation systems, customers can opt for just the software, complete realization or even better outsource the entire operation for managing their Laundromat.

What is the structure of your development team at Pay2Wash?

Our team consists of a hardware developer and a software developer who together develop the connection between the machines and the portal. These mainly work together as a team-effort to improve the compatibility of the Pay2Wash software with a wide variety of machine brands.

Besides the connection to the washing machines, a team 4 software developers work on the Pay2Wash portal to improve friendliness and build in new features, like the upcoming Pay2WashGo.

With Pay2Wash you choose to use the service offering of Cloudbear. Why?

It is our core business, without the system we have nothing to do! If the infrastructure fails, our business would be bankrupt and users would be unable to use the Laundromats.

At first our SaaS application was not scalable. You guys helped our developers in making it both High Available and scalable, with a clear indication of costs (even in the case we may scale). Even though Cloudbear manages the infrastructure, our developers are fully in control with to the Continuous Deployment pipelines Cloudbear build and manages for us. New features are live in minutes and this is control we need - with a company were new features are rolled out in such a steady phase.

We need the reliability and scalability as, if we got a new customer for Pay2Wash, we need to be able to act quickly and scale up easily. Also, we can't make users of Pay2Wash wait if they want to do their wash. Pay2Wash needs to be available.

How is your experience in working together with Cloudbear thus far?

Direct contact with short lines, no hundreds of menus on the phone and a ticket systems that are of no use to you. If I have a problem, I send an Slack message and it will be solved. I especially like Cloudbear on Slack, for direct contact and direct solutions. You really excel at that.

The interview ended with a question Enzo has any further feedback for both the interview and the Cloudbear service offering and we got one clear answer: no.

Interested in the Laundromat services of Pay2Wash? Visit their website.