Case Study: Untappd achieves 7s to 500ms check-ins and effortless autoscaling with Iron.io

Untappd - Customer Case Study

Untappd is a mobile check-in app for beer lovers built by a two-person team that grew to over 1 million users and hundreds of thousands of weekend check-ins. As the service scaled, synchronous processing — first nightly batches, then work done inside the check-in response loop — caused slow check-ins (over 7 seconds on average), strained app servers on busy nights, and hurt user engagement.

Untappd moved event processing to Iron.io (IronMQ + IronWorker), queuing check-ins and handling all background tasks asynchronously outside the user response loop. The change cut average check-in time to about 500 ms, removed the need to manage scaling infrastructure, saved hundreds of development hours, and gave the small team reliable, near-unlimited processing capacity so they can focus on features and users.

Untappd

Greg Avola

Founder/CTO