Case Study: Automatic Labs validates product ideas in days and cuts $10K/month in AWS costs with Databricks

Automatic Labs - Customer Case Study

Automatic Labs collects driving and vehicle telemetry from users and relies on analytics to build products like custom driving reports and fuel-efficiency recommendations. As their dataset grew, their Postgres-based stack could not support the exploratory, interactive analysis engineers and data scientists needed—queries took days, visualization was limited, and product development stalled.

They deployed Databricks on AWS (Spark-based notebooks with simple cluster management) to run interactive Spark SQL and Python analyses. The change cut product validation time from months to days, completed complex queries in minutes instead of days, freed one full-time data scientist from DevOps work, and produced infrastructure savings of about $10K/month—enabling faster insight, collaboration, and a new product launch.

Automatic Labs

Rob Ferguson

Director of Engineering