Case Study - Booking and billing system for small businesses

Overview

When agenda.ch management asked for our help, they were in a pretty common situation. A succession of unmanaged developers had created a lot of technical debt in the company's product stack. Their monthly cloud hosting bill was out of control, despite still offering poor reactivity to the end users.

If they were to survive and thrive, they needed to solve this bottleneck fast.

The software development companies that they contacted all offered them to rewrite the whole product, which was an inacceptable expense for a small startup that had just reached MVP.

What we did

We applied our unique recipe that perfectly matches this kind of situation. Instead of a brute approach, we offered a focused, well scoped audit of their whole stack. As we expected from experience, we found half a dozen requests that caused the bulk of the ressource hog.

We moved the matching business logic from the ruby backend directly into Postgres. From an average of 3 seconds, all impacted requests got down to around 50ms.