Getting Started

Region Selection

When you create a Routebase workspace, you choose where its data lives: the European Union or the United States. The choice is permanent, so it's worth a moment's thought.

TL;DR — Pick EU if you're a European company, work with European customers, or have any GDPR exposure. Pick US if your team and most of your traffic are in North America.

What a region is

Routebase runs as physically isolated deployments. Each region has its own database, object storage, monitoring, and background-job processing. Nothing is shared between regions — everything you create — projects, specifications, test data, uploaded files — stays in the region you chose.

Region Hosting location
European Union Frankfurt, Germany
United States US West Coast

A region can span more than one data centre in that location — which one a given service sits in is an operational detail we may change. What does not change is the country.

You choose the region twice on your way in — once on the Set up your workspace page before creating your account, and once more as the Hosting Region field in the onboarding wizard, right before your organization is provisioned. It's then recorded permanently against that organization.

The workspace region indicator

Trade-offs

Compliance & data residency

Concern US region EU region
GDPR Standard contractual clauses (SCCs) apply; data leaves the EU Data stays in the EU; SCCs not required for EU customers
CLOUD Act US-hosted data can be requested under US law Data is held on EU infrastructure, outside US jurisdiction
Schrems II Requires additional safeguards for EU personal data Not applicable — no transfer to a third country
EU data residency Cannot satisfy EU residency requirements Satisfies EU residency requirements

If your customers, contracts, or auditors require EU data residency, choose the EU region.

Latency

Routebase is highly interactive — the API designer, mock preview, and test runner all round-trip to the server constantly. Pick the region closest to your team; a cross-continent round-trip adds noticeable lag in editor-heavy flows.

Cost

Both regions cost the same.

Seeing your region in the app

The workspace badge in the header shows your organization's name next to a region flag. Click it to see where your data is hosted — the popover reads "Your data is hosted in European Union" (or United States) and reminds you that the region is fixed when you create an organization.

The flag always reflects where your organization's data actually lives, not which server happened to answer the request. Those can differ: if a European workspace is reached through the US entry point, the badge still shows the EU.

What you can and can't change

  • ✅ Organization name, billing, members, projects, specs — all editable as normal.
  • ✅ Your login identity — the same email works across everything.
  • ❌ The region of an existing organization. Changing it is a manual migration, not a setting.

Need to migrate?

Email support@routebase.dev with your organization name and the target region. Migrations are scheduled individually, usually take a few business days, and require a maintenance window during which the organization is read-only.

Frequently asked

Can a single account belong to organizations in both regions? An organization lives in exactly one region. Your login identity binds to one region's user record on first sign-in.

Does the region affect how I reach the app? No. You always sign in at app.routebase.dev; Routebase routes you to the region your organization lives in. There is no per-region address to remember.

Will you add more regions later? Possibly — additional regions are on the long-term roadmap. We'll add one only when there's enough demand to keep both our latency and our compliance promises.