Customer Spotlight – Daniel Caetano, Founder and Lead Developer, SCApp
Daniel Caetano did not set out to build a company. He owned a laundromat, and it annoyed him.
Not the laundromat itself – the admin behind it. Not knowing what each machine had actually taken. Counting coins. Paying a technician to drive across town and tell him what he’d already explained on the phone. The kind of slow friction that, if you let it, just becomes the cost of doing business.
Daniel didn’t let it.
He started building SCApp for his own shop. Other laundromat owners saw it and asked for it. That’s the whole origin story – no eureka moment, no pitch deck, just a long enough list of things that irritated him. Turns out you’re never the only one with your problem – but you can build the solution for your community.
What SCApp actually does
SCApp replaces the coin box.
A customer walks up to a kiosk – or pulls out their phone – and pays by card, contactless, MB WAY, or cash. The machine starts. Simple as that. Behind the scenes, the laundromat owner gets a back office that shows, to the cent, what every single machine has taken, with invoices issued automatically. Manual coin counting and excessive spreadsheets – we bit you adieu!
SCApp is built for the small owner: the person running five to twenty machines who doesn’t have an IT department – or an IT anything. They don’t have to think about servers, only their work.
As of today, SCApp is live across eight laundromats, with 15 control boards driving machines on site, 1,889 registered end customers, and 58,645 transactions since February 2024. Around 2,600 go through every month.
The problem nobody warned him about
Before moving to Contabo, SCApp ran on another provider’s infrastructure. The setup worked – until it didn’t.
The issue was IPv6. Daniel’s address came out of a shared range, and he had no say in who else was on it. Some of those neighbours may have done some unsavory things. The range picked up a bad reputation, and SCApp’s domain started getting marked as junk.
Invoices landed in the spam folder. Password resets. Notifications to laundromat owners.
“When your platform’s whole job is to tell an owner what their machines took, mail that does not arrive is not a cosmetic problem”, Daniel told us.
And there was nothing he could do about it. The reputation wasn’t his to repair, because it wasn’t his to begin with.
Why Contabo
Three reasons, in Daniel’s own order.
First: Contabo is a European company, based in Germany. Data sovereignty is important to Daniel – SCApp chose European suppliers deliberately, all the way down, and state so on their own site. “When the data belongs to laundromat owners and their customers, where it sits matters.”
Second: the reviews. Daniel read a lot of them before switching, and “they were consistently good in a way that’s not common in this market.”
Third – the IPv6 problem simply hasn’t followed him here. The spam folder issue that plagued SCApp’s transactional mail at his previous provider has not come back. We’re glad it hasn’t.
The setup: one machine, eight laundromats
SCApp runs on a single VPS: 8 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04, with automatic backups and the Contabo Cloud Firewall.
Everything lives on that one box. nginx and PHP-FPM serving the public site, plus one subdomain per laundromat behind a wildcard certificate. MariaDB. A Mosquitto MQTT broker talking in real time to the ESP32 boards inside the machines. Memcached. A WireGuard hub putting Daniel’s workstation and the tablet in every shop on one private network. And a full mirror of the back office running as a demo environment – its own system user, its own database.
One affordable machine. Eight laundromats. All the hardware inside every one of them.
The numbers, honestly
Daniel asked us to be accurate rather than flattering here. We think that’s exactly the right instinct.
When he switched, his previous plan was costing him around €10 a month for 6 vCPU, 12 GB RAM, and 100 GB NVMe. His Contabo VPS with automatic backups comes to €12.95 – a roughly 25% higher bill.
What he got for it: twice the RAM, twice the storage, a third more CPU, and his own IPv6 block. Measured per gigabyte of RAM at the time of switching, the cost actually fell. Same story for storage.
“It is not a slightly bigger machine. It is twice the machine, and the invoice barely noticed.”
The other number that stands out: no unplanned downtime. For a laundromat open seven days a week, a server going down means a shop where nobody can wash anything. That hasn’t happened.
What’s next
SCApp is moving from off-the-shelf boards to a PCB designed in-house. They’ve just published a public directory so customers can find a laundromat near them. And they’re thinking about expanding to other countries.
When we asked Daniel how he’d describe Contabo’s role in SCApp’s growth, he said this:
“Contabo is the part of this I do not think about. That is the whole compliment. Every machine in every shop, every payment, every invoice, goes through one box in the Hub Europe Data Center, and my day is spent on the product instead of on the infrastructure. For a company this size that is not a small thing – it is the difference between building and firefighting.”
We’ll take that.
If you’re building something and want infrastructure that stays out of your way, take a look at our VPS plans, and check out what SCApp is doing at scapp.pt – or follow along on their Instagram and Facebook.
Want to be featured? We’re always looking for customers doing interesting things on Contabo infrastructure. Get in touch.
