Design Partner Spotlight: How Certificate Hero Is Shaping the Future of Tech Architecture with Catio
Certificate Hero is a fast-growing SaaS platform that simplifies how certificates of insurance are issued and managed. With enterprise-level architecture complexity and a lean engineering team, Certificate Hero needed a better way to make data-driven infrastructure decisions—without the heavy DevOps overhead.
Their journey with Catio began not as a traditional customer, but as a design partner—collaborating with our product and engineering teams to shape features from the ground up.
“It’s not just about being a small company—everyone, big or small, faces the same challenges: understanding system complexity and optimizing spend. And the standard tools just aren’t enough.” — Richard Myers, Head of Architecture, Certificate Hero
A Design Partnership Built on Shared Vision
Through the design partner program, Certificate Hero gained early access to Catio’s platform and became a core voice in its evolution. They faced a challenge that is common among early-stage SaaS organizations. They were struggling to manage an infrastructure that rivaled the complexity of far larger enterprises. The team brought a clear set of needs to the table:
- Clarity over complexity: AWS-native tools provided only siloed, tabular views, making it hard to get a holistic, graphical overview of their entire infrastructure. This lack of visibility made it challenging to understand how different components interacted and find potential issues.
- Cost awareness without DevOps scaling: With no plans to build a large DevOps team, the focus was on tools that empower existing engineers and leadership to effectively drive cost performance outcomes. They were struggling to identify areas where they were overspending, on over-provisioned resources or misconfigurations, and they found it difficult to pinpoint performance issues within their complex microservices architecture.
- Actionable data, not dashboards: Richard needed to confidently explain infrastructure decisions—especially cost-related ones—to business stakeholders.
Their current size limited spending on DevOps resources, but their ambitions and growth trajectory mandated a performant infrastructure, but one that would scale cost effectively into the future.
What They’ve Found So Far with Catio
Catio’s powerful, user-friendly tools paved the path for Certificate Hero to tame its complex AWS infrastructure.
Holistic Visibility
With Catio’s graphical architecture model, Richard and his team gained a clearer understanding of resource allocation and infrastructure misconfigurations. The Stacks module offered a holistic, visual view of their systems, simplifying complex deployments and enabling informed optimization decisions.
“With AWS, everything is a table. With Catio, we finally got a visual of how everything is connected. That’s critical for us"
AI Recommendations That Matter
Rather than relying on guesswork or over-provisioning (which often led to higher AWS bills), Catio provided AI-driven insights to highlight potential inefficiencies and suggest corrective actions—all tailored to their unique architecture. Whether cost-saving opportunities, performance bottlenecks, or areas where alignment with AWS best practices could be improved, Certificate Hero gained the expertise to pursue these advancements without needing to scale up their teams.
Empowerment Without the Overhead
As Head of Architecture, Richard now has the tools to validate decisions, defend costs, and flag issues—without needing to rely exclusively on DevOps engineers.
Taken together, these benefits helped Certificate Hero shift their infrastructure-management process from reactive to proactive—and increased scalability at the same time.
“Catio enables existing teams to be more productive. We’re not just delegating down to junior staff—we’re also enabling leaders like myself to make more informed, confident decisions.”
Looking Ahead: From Design Partner to Production Deployment
Certificate Hero hasn’t yet gone into production with Catio—but their feedback has directly influenced major product improvements. As they grow, the value proposition of fully onboarding with Catio only becomes more compelling.
We’re proud to collaborate with visionary teams like Certificate Hero—teams who understand that observability, automation, and continuous optimization are the new must-haves for managing modern infrastructure.
“Catio is transforming the way organizations manage their infrastructure. In my decades as an IT leader, the biggest challenge has always been turning complex stack data into actionable insights. Catio is a true innovator in this space.” —Richard Myers, Head of Architecture
About Catio
Catio is the AI-powered copilot for tech architecture. We help CTOs, architects, and tech leads:
- Gain deep visibility into complex tech stacks to make faster and more informed decisions
- Receive tailored AI recommendations for continuous expert advice that scales organizationally
- Plan architecture improvements aligned to business goals to maximize business impact