30k+ icons on Clever (and counting…)

Entrepreneur for a long time; Clément Sauvage (@clementsauvage) set up his first company when he was sixteen. Throughout the years, while building apps, Clément was always searching for beautiful icons. Then he founds Vincent’s (@webalys, a French designer based in Massachusetts, USA) work: the Streamline Icons project (streamlineicons.com) in the late 2014.

Nowadays Clément is primarily focused on 2 projects, Just a Call (justacall.io), a contact center in Slack and The Streamline App, an app with all Webalys’s icons (more than 30,000 icons available, and more to come).

There are a bunch of different websites where can find icons in the wild, but you’ll find disparate styles: glyphs, outlines … Then you will have to open your favorite design software (Illustrator, Sketch, …) to swap colors, size, export,  etc.

The Streamline app is different, they use web technologies to make a fast, reliable and responsive platform. Customers can access their beloved icon collections from all over the world, changing color live, and exporting them in different formats (PNG, SVG, PDF). They’ve also published React packages, developers can have access to beautifully created icons just by typing <StreamlineIcon /> in their favorite IDE.

Clément started to develop a viewer a year and a half ago, the initial idea was to expose the whole collections to Vincent’s customers (including fortune 500 like Booking.com, Mercedes-Benz, Converse, Bank of America…), see what icons were available before buying and downloading the pack.

Nowadays, the application is much more complex: Mainly javascript (Node runtime in the back, React front end), with a bit of Python (ML with Tensorflow) and Elixir (locally).  

“We had to build something super robust because it must not crash with customers; everything is tested, very solid, this is one of the reasons why we use Clever Cloud.”

Why did you choose Clever Cloud for this project?

Separated work, better concerns

I’m not an infra guy; I’m a “creative”, trying to change the world with my text editor (paraphrasing Jeff Lawson, Twilio co-founder & CEO). I need to create content without worrying about infrastructure. I want to use code to make, not something else.

Performance and Confidence

Being a freelancer, sometimes, I have to use other hosting providers to fit my customer's requirements (the same provider, their own solutions…). Throughout 2019, my Clever Cloud hosted apps were down for 8 minutes, while at Ionos (formely 1 & 1) they were down over 5 or 6 days.

Costs Reasons

Clever Cloud has the right pricing. It is much more advantageous than another huge player based in Seattle, WA, USA, for example, at the end of the month you don’t end up with a crazy bill and bad surprises. Just an example here : Yesterday, one of my app had to handle 1,4 Millions requests (that's 40% more than usually), the cost for me was just… 24 cents.

Friendship and Innovation

I know Quentin for years now (and Clément for a little bit less), I trust them and I know they are 200% committed to their company. Trying to build yet the best hosting provider with a great focus on customer care and innovation which are truly important these days.

PS: Clément is the developer behind Clever Companion (https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/clever-companion/id1454703865) the official Clever Client for macOS.

PPS: Get 15% off Streamline icon using clever-coupon until 5/30/2020 during checkout!