Companies Using Envoy

I run the crawler that stores the response headers of every domain we visit, and Envoy's raw count needed a cut before I could write about it. A domain counts when a response carries Server: envoy or x-envoy-upstream-service-time. Our raw October 2026 crawl had 125,012 such domains. After the usual title filter and a redirect check that removed 5,682 for-sale landers and dead-site placeholders, 111,830 remain, 1st of 12 rows with 32.4%, and 56,909 match a company. On 16 October 2026 I re-requested a random 2% of the list, resolved every address and grouped the answers by network and by the platforms' own headers.

What the header means

Envoy is the open-source proxy originally built at Lyft, released under the Apache 2.0 licence and graduated by the CNCF on 28 November 2018. Its router sets x-envoy-upstream-service-time, the milliseconds the server behind it took, and that header is the one most sites leak: in a random 50, 24 of the 32 live hosts sent only that line, 6 sent both and 2 sent only the banner. The banner itself varies. istio-envoy marks Istio's gateways, volt-adc marks F5 Distributed Cloud, and some banners carry a suffix, such as envoy-iad.

Sales signal: the header tells you a proxy layer exists, not who bought it. Work out whether the site runs Envoy or its platform does before you pitch anything.

The cut that came first

The raw count included 3,949 domains that redirect to GoDaddy's for-sale marketplace or Afternic, 73 that forward to a domain store and 1,660 platform placeholders: Lightspeed's "Webshop closed", Onepage's "Website is not found", bare "Error" pages and Mailchimp, Dropbox and Klaviyo 404s. Their titles were the bare domain name or blank, so only following the redirects caught them. We missed some. 7 of the 87 for-sale landers in the sample aren't on the list, so roughly 350 to 400 remain.

"Before the cut, one domain in twenty on this page was a parked name or a dead shop. The header was real. The site wasn't." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: on any header-based list, follow the redirect before you trust the title. A lander can answer with a perfectly good proxy header.

Who puts it there

No host dominates the way Namecheap does on the Apache APISIX page. Zendesk's help centres are the largest group, 211 of 2,231 sampled hostnames (9.46%), mostly help and support subdomains of companies that host their help desk there. Lightspeed eCom stores follow at 4.57%, Salla stores at 3.94%, TradeIndia seller sites at 3.72%, Cars Commerce's dealer sites at 3.68% and F5 Distributed Cloud customers at 3.63%. Freshworks help desks, Popmenu restaurant sites, Thinkific courses, GoDaddy's reseller storefronts, Mailchimp websites, Keller Williams agent sites, Medium and Banno's bank sites each add between 0.9% and 3.41%. Together, the named platforms are about 46% of the sample.

Sales signal: a help centre on Zendesk or a shop on Lightspeed is a customer of that platform. Pitch the site owner on what the platform doesn't do, and sell infrastructure to the platform.

How much of it is current

1,612 of the 2,231 sampled hostnames (72.25%) sent the header on 16 October 2026, and 32 of a random 50. Most of the gap is our side being blocked, not Envoy being gone: 411 hostnames returned a Cloudflare or similar bot check with no headers to read, among them the dealer, Popmenu and Keller Williams sites. 100 (4.48%) didn't answer at all. Since tracking began on 16 March 2026, 153,941 domains dropped the header on at least one hostname, more than the live count, and 1,742 of them still send it from another. The set of domains we crawl turns over every month, dead sites out and newly found ones in, and our detection signals widen, so read churn as turnover.

Sales signal: plain HTTP checks undercount the platform-hosted side. If you verify this list yourself, use a browser for Cloudflare-fronted sites.

Who and where

46.82% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees and 26.16% have 11 to 50, but 2,374 have more than 1,000. The United States has 23,810 matched companies, the United Kingdom 2,770, India 2,683 and the Netherlands 2,656, where 983 co-detect Lightspeed eCom. 776 of Saudi Arabia's 883 run Salla. Software Development (8.19%) and Retail (7.98%) lead the industries, and the dealer, estate-agent and bank rows carry Dealer Inspire, Keller Williams and Banno.

Sales signal: segment by platform first, then by size. A five-person shop on Salla and a bank with thousands of staff on Istio share a header and nothing else.

The self-run side

About half the sample sits outside any platform I could name, and that is where the recognisable companies are. Many run Envoy inside an Istio mesh: 334 sampled hostnames sent istio-envoy, and Istio's documentation says it uses an extended version of Envoy. PNC's sign-on site, NVIDIA's build portal, Deere's shop, Edward Jones, Johnson & Johnson and Turkish Airlines' e-ticket site all answered that way. Airbnb, Uber and Apple's card site send the plain header. Boeing, Travelers and XPO answer through F5 Distributed Cloud, whose edge sends Envoy's timing header under a volt-adc banner.

Sales signal: an istio-envoy banner means a Kubernetes platform team. That team buys service-mesh support, observability and API security, and the subdomain tells you which application sits behind it.

Overlap and movement

We publish one switching pair. 113 domains moved from Amazon ELB to Envoy since tracking began, 34 in the last 30 days, and 54 went the other way. That is about 2 to 1 in Envoy's favour, on a tiny base. Overlap is far larger than switching because these layers stack: 1,236 domains run an Envoy host and an Azure Front Door host today, 985 Amazon ALB, 478 Google Cloud Load Balancing and 14 Application Request Routing.

"Envoy rarely replaces a cloud load balancer. It sits behind one, and our overlap counts are mostly that stacking." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: a domain with Envoy behind Front Door or ALB has two traffic layers to manage. That's the opening for edge security and cost tools; a proxy swap is the wrong pitch.

The stack around it

Cloudflare sits in front of 56.31% of the 111,826 clean domains, so on most of them Envoy is the layer behind the CDN. Next.js shows on 19.26%, WordPress on 16.15% and Ruby on Rails on 14.85%, the last partly Zendesk, Thinkific and Freshworks domains. Nginx shows on 11.54% and Amazon CloudFront on 13.81%. GoDaddy appears on 15.85%, but its domains resolved to other platforms in our sample.

Sales signal: a site behind Cloudflare and Envoy already has its edge built. Sell what sits above it: the help desk, the store or the application.

Key takeaways

• 111,830 domains after removing 5,682 for-sale landers and placeholders; 32.4% of Load Balancers & Proxies, 1st of 12.
• Zendesk help centres are the biggest platform at 9.46% of sampled hostnames.
• About half the sample sits outside the named platforms; that half holds the companies running Envoy themselves, often under Istio.
• 72.25% of sampled hostnames showed the header on 16 October 2026; most of the rest were bot checks.
• Switching is small (113 in, 54 out with Amazon ELB); stacking is common.

Sales applications

Outreach template: "Your [subdomain] answers through an Istio gateway. Teams running Envoy at that scale usually want [your product's outcome]. Here's how [peer] handled it." Use it on the istio-envoy hosts.

Targeting strategy: drop the Zendesk, Lightspeed, Salla and other platform rows, then filter for companies above 1,000 staff. What remains is platform teams with budget.

Competitive angle: for the platform customers, compete with the platform's built-in features; for the self-run side, compete with what the mesh team would build.

The full list of 111,830 domains and 56,909 matched companies, with size, country, industry and stack, is on TechnologyChecker.io.