OnlyFacts is an Australian public data platform that publishes real-world data, starting with climate and energy, as ready-to-use feeds and visualisations. It was founded by Juliette O'Brien OAM and Anthony Macali OAM, who built some of Australia's first COVID-19 data trackers. The platform runs on a Ruby on Rails application with a large PostgreSQL data and visualisation database, and until October 2026 it ran on Heroku.
The case study goes deeper than this post. See every platform component and how releases reach production. It also shows how we priced Heroku like for like.
Download the case studyThe problem with staying on Heroku
OnlyFacts' Heroku plan had two limitations. The application was not hosted in Australia, and the database did not offer full permissions. Moving to Heroku's Sydney region would have solved the hosting location, but it was quoted at around A$1,400 a month. It still would not have provided superuser database access or root access to the servers.
OnlyFacts needed a platform that would provide:
- Servers in Australia, close to its users
- Full read and write database permissions, plus a read-only role for AI agents
- Separate production and staging environments, with code and data pipelines applied to staging first
- A budget well below the Heroku Sydney quote
The platform
Lightspeed designed and built OnlyFacts its own application platform on Lightspeed Cloud, running on infrastructure we own and operate in Melbourne. Deployments run on Coolify, an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Heroku. It keeps the push-to-deploy workflow the developers already knew, so the team kept working exactly as before. Underneath it, the engineers who built the platform run everything else: the private network, compute, storage and nightly backups.
The platform runs in a single private network divided into three tiers, each with its own network ACL:
- Application tier: a load balancer as the public entry point, application workers that run the Rails containers and terminate TLS, the Coolify orchestrator, and a GitHub Actions runner that executes data pipelines inside the private network
- Data tier: a dedicated PostgreSQL server with 16 GB of memory, hosting both the production and staging databases, with no public address
- Remote access tier: a bastion that accepts SSH keys only and provides tunnels to PostgreSQL
Developers connect through a per-person VPN. The Coolify dashboard and the database are reachable only over the VPN.
Code pushed to GitHub deploys automatically, first to staging and then to production, the same way it did on Heroku. OnlyFacts also received an architecture pack written for its developer, covering deployments, rollbacks and day-to-day operation of the platform.
Delivery
- 13 August 2026: first enquiry
- 21 August 2026: proof of concept
- 10 September 2026: architecture pack delivered
- 2 October 2026: live on Lightspeed Cloud
The build took three weeks from start to go-live, and the cutover had zero downtime.
Results
Cost. The platform costs A$338 a month (A$4,056 a year). The Heroku Sydney equivalent would have cost around A$1,400 a month (A$16,800 a year). That is a saving of A$12,744 a year, with Heroku costing four times as much. All prices exclude GST.
Speed. Homepage generation time (Rails x-runtime) dropped from 5,445 ms on Heroku to 509 ms on Lightspeed Cloud. Origin response time measured through Cloudflare dropped from 5,649 ms to 527 ms. The Lightspeed figures are the median of seven requests, measured on 23 October 2026.
Security. On Heroku, Postgres accepted connections from anywhere. On Lightspeed Cloud, no database is exposed to the internet.
"Moving from a large overseas corporate to Lightspeed Hosting was the best decision we've made all year. Our platform is now lightning quick, and everything about the service is better, faster and, surprisingly, more cost-effective."
Juliette O'Brien OAM, Co-Founder, OnlyFacts
Heroku compared with Lightspeed Cloud
| Heroku (Sydney Private Space) | Lightspeed Cloud (Melbourne) | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosted in Australia | Yes, Sydney | Yes, Melbourne |
| Production and staging | Yes | Yes |
| Database memory | 4 GB per database | 16 GB dedicated server |
| Superuser database access | No | Yes |
| Root access to servers | No | Yes |
| Private network | Private Space | 3 tiers, VPN, bastion |
| Direct engineer access | No | Yes |
| Monthly cost (ex GST) | ~A$1,400 | A$338 |
| Annual cost (ex GST) | ~A$16,800 | A$4,056 |
"The support and responsiveness have been exceptional. We feel more secure working with an Australian business with sovereign cloud infrastructure. We couldn't be happier or more grateful."
Juliette O'Brien OAM, Co-Founder, OnlyFacts
The case study goes deeper than this post. See every platform component and how releases reach production. It also shows how we priced Heroku like for like.
Download the case studyMoving an application off Heroku?
Book a 20-minute call. We will review your current platform, your databases and your deployment workflow, and show you what the same application would look like on Lightspeed Cloud.
Prefer to build it yourself? The Self-Hosted Application Platform reference architecture documents the pattern behind the OnlyFacts platform. It includes the network design, a portal walkthrough, Coolify installation steps, ready-to-run deployment scripts for CloudMonkey, Ansible and Terraform, and checks to verify the build.
Call 1300 078 078 or email [email protected].