Case Study: Lago achieves up to 137x faster queries with ClickHouse

Lago Using ClickHouse to Scale an Events Engine

Lago, the open-source usage-based billing platform, needed to scale its events engine as it began ingesting millions of events per minute. Its Postgres-only stack was struggling under the load, slowing the entire app and making it difficult to support heavy analytical queries alongside transactional workloads.

To solve this, Lago moved streamed events to ClickHouse Cloud, using ClickHouse for OLAP analytics while keeping Postgres for the rest of the application. ClickHouse’s columnar storage, materialized views, and vectorized query execution helped Lago speed up key queries by at least 18x and as much as 137x, including reducing a weighted sum aggregation from 6.6 seconds in Postgres to 48 milliseconds in ClickHouse.

Lago