LavinMQ - The engine behind Heja's global growth

They usually operate in silence, but without them, everything grinds to a halt. Message queues are the invisible backbone of modern IT, preventing systems from buckling under their own weight. For Heja, LavinMQ has been the quiet force behind a global success story—proving that you can scale internationally without drowning in infrastructure costs.

When the Swedish communication platform laget.se, which specializes in communication within sports teams, decided to expand internationally, it evolved into heja.io. With the international market in focus, things moved fast. US users embraced the app, and it is now the company’s largest market.

The app, where “team parents” and coaches coordinate everything from carpooling to practice schedules, relies entirely on sharing and conveying information. As the user base grew, so did the challenge of handling tens of millions of requests each day. For Heja, the challenge was finding a sustainable path forward without being weighed down by complexity and skyrocketing server costs.

“The common instinct is to continuously upgrade the database by moving to a bigger server when you get more users. But early on, we asked ourselves whether there might be a better way to scale,” says Kent Cederström, Lead Engineer at Heja.

In reality, when an app is under pressure, the bottleneck is rarely a lack of raw server power. It’s the flow. With that insight, Heja chose to migrate from their previous queuing system to LavinMQ, developed by the Swedish tech company 84codes.

The difference was immediate and almost surreal. At first, Cederström and his colleagues thought something was wrong.

“Before the migration, we saw CPUs and RAM working overtime just to handle the requests. When we switched to LavinMQ, the load dropped to almost zero. We even checked the network for errors, but it turned out LavinMQ was simply that efficient,” Cederström explains.

What makes LavinMQ different?

The open source message broker LavinMQ helps secure the underlying architecture and makes it resilient to failure.

“It’s about fault tolerance. Things go wrong sometimes; that’s just the nature of tech. But with LavinMQ, you handle it smarter. Instead of the user having to manually retry a request to the server, the system can automatically retry the message. You can configure it to think: ‘This needs to happen. It didn’t work this time, so let’s try again,” Kent explains.

He explains that this creates a very different safety net during technical hiccups: “Once systems are up and running again, all the data is still there. The system processes the information as if nothing happened. No data is lost, which makes the environment much more robust.”

For Heja, this meant systems could be stabilized and improved without affecting the user experience. They could use resources more efficiently and scale exactly where needed, without hardware costs spiraling out of control.

The missing piece of the puzzle

While Heja.io focuses on team sports, LavinMQ handles the behind-the-scenes logistics. Messaging systems have become a vital part of the SaaS market, and the company behind it, 84codes, is one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies.

“LavinMQ was created to meet a specific customer need. We encountered companies with performance requirements that existing solutions couldn’t satisfy,” says Daniel Marklund at 84codes. “For startups and scale-ups today, it’s crucial to deliver a seamless service cost-effectively. LavinMQ makes that possible.”

Today, the technology is used across industries, from stock exchanges to airlines and healthcare providers—industries where demand is extreme, and the margin for error is zero.

“Scaling challenges are good problems to have. It means you’re doing something right, and demand is high. Companies in that position often discover our technology as the solution to high-traffic challenges,” Daniel Marklund concludes.