Case Study: Quikly achieves instant 0-to-500,000 visitor scaling for flash campaigns with Heroku

How Quikly Goes from 0 to 500,000 Visitors on Heroku

Quikly is a marketing platform that uses gamified, time‑limited SMS promotions to drive rapid consumer engagement and social referrals — think Black Friday–level spikes compressed into minutes. With only two engineers and a seed budget, Quikly needed to support sudden surges of hundreds of thousands of visitors without paying for idle capacity the rest of the time.

By running on Heroku and using PX Dynos, Quikly can scale up in seconds and scale back down after a campaign, spinning up 30+ dynos only when needed. This approach kept costs predictable and enabled Quikly to handle spikes from 0 to 500,000 visitors in a single afternoon (for example, a Domino’s campaign that drew 500k visitors and selected 150k participants), allowing the company to expand its client list and run high‑traffic promotions reliably.

Quikly

Scott Meves

CTO & Co-Founder, Quikly