Built for pets and families. Powered by GCP.

What is Everkin?

Everkin is a platform for tracking, monitoring, learning and sharing everything about your pets health. As a cat dad x4, pets don't always tell us whats wrong, so spotting trends, observing and correlating these even minor observations can lead to big revelations. I spent a decade plus dealing with almost impossible to diagnose health problems with my older cats. And if you ever worked with me you know I was often at the vet.

At the start we had 5 guiding principles:

1. Leverage the most modern technology in an easy to use way.

2. A beautiful and comforting interface

3. The ability to export all data, in the form of pure csv exports or PDFs

4. Make sharing between family members seamless.

5. Make sharing with a caregiver or pet sitter a first class feature.

We spent about a year building the app and infrastructure before we launched in April of 2026. We switched cloud providers, programming languages and iOS design patterns many times until we built a strong stable foundation. I am going to go over a high level review of our cloud infrastructure and later posts being more specific and detailed. I am proud of what we built. Growth has been steady and the goal to help pets everywhere is moving forward.

Everkin was designed from the beginning to be a client/server architecture. Building only on iOS (iCloud sync) meant we could not do core features of our app such as family sharing and sync, advanced machine learning and data analysis, and integration with third party services.

As an engineer with 17 years in the industry, building things is still exciting and when I approached this problem I wanted to leverage every bit of experience I had to build the most stable, expandable and blog worthy architecture I could. While minimizing costs across our cloud providers and tools.

The Author

I am Corey, founder of Ghost Labs and creator of Everkin. This is a real post written by a real human. Ghost Labs is, of course, named after my cat Ghost.

Everkin is currently available on the iOS App Store with Android and web clients in active development. In this post we are going to go over the cloud system architecture that powers our pet care app and allows hundreds of users to manage their pets health data, images, family sharing and content moderation.

I am a solo founder. I have been building things in my free time for 20 years. It took that long to find my purpose. This here is what I was meant to build. (also games, but I had to shelve my Unreal ghost hunting project for now)

System Architecture - Google Cloud

Everkin is built on Google Cloud Platform and part of the Google startup program which helps us grow as our user base expands.

Our goals with this design are the following:

1. Fully managed by Terraform IoC.

2. Deep observability with Sentry and now Datadog.

3. Fully automated CI/CD deployments, backups.

With this I think we have achieved our goals for our initial vision.

Our core API is built in Go, running as a container on Cloud Run behind Cloudflare. I come from a long history of Python and an always-burning curiosity, and I chose Go here deliberately. As a compiled, statically typed language, it eliminated a whole class of bugs that used to surface at runtime in Python, and that typing discipline carries all the way down: instead of an ORM, we use SQLC to generate type-safe query code straight from our SQL, so the compiler catches mistakes before they ever reach the database (knock on wood).

We also didn't reach for a heavy framework. The standard library's net/http, plus a thin middleware stack: Sentry, panic recovery, CORS, security headers, logging, rate limiting, and auth, in that order was all we needed. The rest of the stack is: Postgres on Cloud SQL, Redis for caching, GCS for photos and documents, SES for email, and Sentry+Datadog with OpenTelemetry for tracing.

Go's concurrency model is the part we keep appreciating: fire-forget side effects, long running workers, request scoped parallel fan out. And as a bonus, Go pairs unusually well with agentic coding tools: the small language surface and fast compile loop give the model tight feedback, and the type system catches its mistakes at compile time rather than in production.

We run a number of Cloud Scheduler jobs (which are just internal API requests cron jobs) to handle things like Apple push notifications, reminders, PII cleanup for deleted accounts, caregiver access controls and more. These are cheap to run and enable our platform to do a lot of background processing.

Redis is our primary read cache. It's currently serving about 67% of our api requests. iOS apps tend to be heavy on reads (even with months of redesigning our iOS Swift architecture) and Redis helps alleviate stress on our DB as well as quickly serving common API requests.

Database migrations are handled via Goose and our automated at deploy time.

The last piece is Ember, our internal Python API and tooling. It handles Cloud functions such as content moderation. Its in progress features include a full RAG system for smart document handling, ML analytics and some experimental ideas around LLM integration (note, we only use tech we feel can help our users and their pets, we are not shoving AI into everything for the sake of saying we are AI powered. we are not a YC company)

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is our preferred DNS hosting platform as well as our host for the marketing site and the partial web app. Cloudflare for a small startup offers a great set of tools and is cost effective (cost is critical at early stage, so this is a theme) to get started. It also easily integrates into our CI/CD workflow. We currently host 2 applications there: are marketing site and our "web" app (which is just a reset password workflow at this time).

Wrap up

That's a bit of a high-level review of the system that powers Everkin. It's growing at incredible speed and we are always leveraging new technologies, methods and patterns. In the next part I will go over content moderation pipeline, and how we ensure our platform is not used for bad actors and illicit images.

If you have pets and want to try Everkin, it's free. There is an Everkin+ upgrade, but for readers of this blog I will send you a code for a free sub, just send me a DM on Twitter/X or LinkedIn, I am very liberal with these codes so please don't hesitate to reach out.

Any feedback, good and bad, is also something I would love to hear. When you spend your early mornings, nights, weekends alone building things you tend to wear blinders when it comes to how things work. You also let your biases show in how things are designed and operate.

Corey