Case Study: Kik Interactive achieves 90% data-warehousing cost savings with Amazon Web Services

Kik Interactive - Customer Case Study

Kik Interactive, founded in 2009, operates the Kik Messenger platform with over 275 million users and must keep its service fast, responsive, and highly available while turning vast, dispersed log data into actionable product and growth insights. The company faced the dual challenge of maintaining real-time messaging performance for subscribers and unlocking buried customer data to guide development and reduce churn.

Kik moved its stack and analytics to AWS—using EC2, S3, VPC, CloudFormation, Direct Connect, CloudFront, Route 53, EMR and Amazon Redshift—to build a microservice architecture and a scalable data platform. That migration cut managed data from 500 TB to 50 TB, lowered data-warehouse costs from an estimated $1M to $100K annually (≈90% savings), delivered a 30% performance uplift from Redshift upgrades, and enabled faster personalization and analytics via Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB.

Kik Interactive

Joel Cumming

Head of Data