Case Study: Steller achieves seamless scaling to millions of users with Heroku

Steller, Apple’s Best of 2019 Mobile App, is Powered by Heroku

Steller is a travel storytelling app (Apple’s Best of 2019) that grew from a small team into a globally used platform, reaching over a million users by 2019. The company needed to deliver low-latency, high-performance mobile experiences and manage massive numbers of user photos and metadata while avoiding heavy ops overhead as usage spiked.

Steller used Heroku’s managed platform—Heroku Postgres for JSON metadata, AWS S3 for image storage, and add-ons like Redis, Scheduler, autoscaling, and Review Apps—to create a hybrid, scalable backend. The result: seamless handling of traffic surges with no major outages or late-night operations, automatic cost-efficient scaling, and a stable foundation that supports continued growth and new features.

Steller

Ondřej Synek

Lead