Case Study: Kickstarter achieves scalable, faster image and GIF delivery with imgix

How the largest community for creative projects powers its visuals with imgix

Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding platform with $2.2B pledged by 10 million backers, relies on high-resolution images, animated GIFs, and video to power campaigns—creators upload over 10,000 files daily and the site serves billions of images each month. Their legacy asset system struggled to scale: real-time thumbnail generation caused timeouts and memory exhaustion, maintaining many pre-generated sizes was brittle, and large animated GIFs loaded slowly and left blank spaces while the animation fetched.

Kickstarter evaluated several options and integrated imgix—an initial refactor took days and traffic was migrated gradually—so they could generate multiple sizes and formats dynamically from a single master image. That enabled a new optimized GIF workflow, eliminated costly pre-generation, improved load times and mobile responsiveness (via Client Hints and srcset), and surfaced detailed bandwidth data by asset type. The result: a more scalable, faster image pipeline, better creator/user experience, and measurable engineering and business benefits.

KickStarter

Lance Ivy

Principal Engineer