Case Study: Unsplash achieves rapid scaling and community growth with Heroku

Heroku App Builds a Creative Community around Curated Top Quality Photos

Unsplash, built by Crew, is a curated community and gallery of free, high-resolution photos that began as a Tumblr marketing side project. When demand exploded, the team faced the challenge of productizing the site and immediately handling millions of requests per day with a single developer and no dedicated DevOps resources.

Crew migrated Unsplash to Heroku and built the app on Rails using Heroku Postgres, Redis, MemCachier and imgix for resizing/CDN, leveraging the Rails ecosystem to move fast. The hosted platform removed DevOps overhead, allowed the team to focus on product and UX, and enabled rapid scaling—driving continued growth (30% of Crew’s revenue now comes from Unsplash referrals), a larger development team, an active community of tens of thousands of photos, and successful initiatives like the crowdfunded Unsplash Book.

Unsplash

Luke Chesser

Co-Founder, Crew