February 5, 2026

How Upside Maintains Enterprise-Grade Quality Without QA Engineers

For small engineering teams building products that enterprise customers depend on, quality can't be optional—but neither can velocity. Here's how Upside came to depend on Ranger.

Nate Mihalovich

Head of Ops @ Ranger

The Challenge: Moving Fast Without Breaking Features

Upside provides forensic revenue attribution and intelligence for B2B go-to-market teams. Their platform helps enterprise customers understand which sales and marketing activities drive deals—making stability and reliability non-negotiable.

Jonas Bauer, Co-Founder and Engineering Lead at Upside, faced a common but critical problem: his small team needed to maintain enterprise-grade quality while shipping at startup velocity.

''We were looking for a solution because we're a small company and we didn't have the muscle to go build out a lot of complex testing infrastructure ourselves. We needed a way to very quickly get confidence that the core workflows our users go through in our application remained stable."

The problem wasn't just about catching bugs—it was about the hidden costs of quality assurance:

Manual testing was becoming a bottleneck: "It's a laundry list of things to go test each time you make a change. It's just not feasible to do that by hand."
Building internal QA infrastructure would be expensive: Estimating the equivalent work in-house, Jonas calculated needing "half to three-quarters worth of a full time QA and test infrastructure engineer."
Enterprise customers expect polish: "For our customers who are coming and purchasing Upside as an enterprise product, they expect a kind of stable enterprise experience there."

The Hidden Cost of A Lagging QA Process

‍Most early-stage engineering teams face four options for end-to-end testing.

Manual testing - Unsustainable as the product grows
Building internal QA infrastructure - Expensive and slow
Using AI to write tests - Brittle and not comprehensive
Hiring QA engineers - Six-figure salaries plus overhead
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"Running an in-house quality assurance process is a very time and labor intensive task. It's not necessarily compute intensive or capital intensive, but it's very time and labor intensive. A lot of people have a tendency to underestimate that because you can get up and going fairly quickly, but it's the long term drag of every test that you add that you maintain forever and each time something breaks and all the things that you have to do over the full life cycle that makes that total cost of ownership very different than what you might expect."The math was clear: building and maintaining QA infrastructure in-house would cost 2-3x Ranger's pricing, not to mention the opportunity cost of engineering time.

Ranger's Impact: Shipping Faster, Breaking Less

Increased Release Confidence:
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Before Ranger, Upside had an informal policy of letting changes "bake" in staging for 1-2 days to catch issues. Now:

"I definitely feel more confident releasing more frequently now than I did three or four months ago. Now things are pretty confident on having things go out same day once test flows have run."

‍Enabled Technical Debt Reduction:
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Testing coverage gave the team confidence to tackle refactors they'd been avoiding:

"We had a number of places in the code base that were starting to become a sort of people didn't want to engage with as much for risk of it causing an issue. With that, the combination of the end-to-end tests with Ranger and other test automation workflows we've built internally, we kind of have much more confidence that we can go do those types of reworks and we'll know if we break something by accident."

Real example: In just the past few weeks, Ranger caught multiple regressions during refactors, including "issues flagged up where we went in and we made some changes and it broke some specific scenario on a specific data table in one page."

Prevented Compounding Quality Issues:

"Even if any one individual issue that gets out isn't the end of the world, catching even minor issues in small parts of the dashboard before they get out in front of customers goes a long way in preventing that kind of compounding dog-piling effect that can happen over time."

The Bottom Line

Jonas's advice to other engineering leaders considering QA automation:

"Don't underestimate the cost of owning QA. Running an in-house quality assurance process is very time and labor intensive. I think a lot of people underestimate that because you can get up and going fairly quickly, but it's the long term drag that makes the total cost of ownership very different than what you might expect."

ROI in numbers: