Case Study: CardFlight achieves PCI compliance, 40% lower infrastructure costs, and high availability with Amazon Web Services

CardFlight - Customer Case Study

CardFlight builds mobile point-of-sale tools—SDKs, card readers, and EMV-ready APIs—that let merchants accept chip-card payments on smartphones and tablets. As a startup, it faced the stringent security, encryption, auditing, and physical-control requirements of PCI DSS and needed a fast, cost-effective way to achieve enterprise-grade compliance without the expense of building its own data centers.

CardFlight moved its infrastructure to AWS, using services such as EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, KMS, IAM, and CloudTrail and leveraging the AWS Activate program for startup support. The move enabled a PCI-compliant environment built in weeks, delivered enterprise encryption and auditable controls, cut estimated capex and opex by about 40%, provided high availability (total downtime of one hour since launch), and let the company scale rapidly while focusing investment on product development.

CardFlight

Jesse Angell

Software Engineer