When we started pxxl, the fastest deploy target for a developer in Lagos was a 250ms round-trip away. Our infrastructure decisions flipped that: build locally, deploy locally, serve locally.
The economics of cloud have been written for customers in Ashburn and Dublin. Every layer of the stack — DNS, TLS, compute, storage — optimizes for transatlantic traffic. We didn't want to be one more platform where Lagos developers paid in latency so that San Francisco could feel snappy.
So we did something boring: we opened in Lagos first. lagos-1 was live before we had a New York region. When we benchmarked cold starts in West Africa, we were 18x faster than the next-best option. That's not a rounding error — that's the difference between an app feeling local and feeling cloud-hosted.
We've since added Nairobi, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Every region has the same compute, the same Postgres, the same pricing in local currency. Frankfurt, Ashburn, and Singapore came later — not because they're less important, but because they were already well-served.
The next billion developers aren't in California. They're in Accra, Kampala, Dhaka, Bengaluru, Jakarta. They deserve a platform that was designed for them from day one.