Case Study: Rachio achieves 40% faster time-to-market and secure, scalable IoT delivery with AWS IoT

Rachio - Customer Case Study

Rachio, a Colorado-based software company that makes the Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controller, needed to get a Wi‑Fi–based irrigation product to market quickly while minimizing investment in hardware and backend operations. The startup faced tight time‑to‑market constraints, limited engineering resources, concerns about securely managing device certificates, and the need to scale reliably during peak watering periods. To address these issues Rachio chose the AWS IoT managed cloud platform (along with other AWS services) to handle device connectivity and security.

Using AWS IoT for secure MQTT device communication—routing millions of daily messages to Amazon SQS—and leveraging Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Rachio built a scalable, secure backend without a large ops team. AWS IoT’s policy‑based security eliminated costly certificate reissue workflows, and the overall AWS solution delivered measurable impact: Rachio brought its product to market 40% faster, cut development costs by about 40%, and gained automatic scalability and simpler operations to handle peak loads.

Rachio

Franz Garsombke

Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder