Case Study: Cambly achieves seamless global scale to serve millions of language learners with Heroku

Cambly Scales to Serve Millions of Language Learners on Heroku

Cambly is an on‑demand English‑learning platform that connects students with native tutors over live video to practice conversation and job‑specific language skills. From its 2013 start the company needed infrastructure that could serve any number of learners worldwide from day one, so founders looked for a solution that avoided heavy DevOps and supported rapid global scale.

Cambly chose Heroku’s managed PaaS for its flexibility and easy integration with third‑party services (MongoDB Atlas, Vonage, Papertrail, etc.), plus autoscaling and monitoring tools to handle both predictable peaks and unexpected surges like the COVID‑era boom. The result: a lean engineering team that could focus on product, seamless scaling to serve millions of learners, expansion into new markets and offerings (including Cambly Kids), and a move to Heroku Enterprise to prepare for continued growth.

Cambly

Kevin Law

Co-Founder