Case Study: Calm achieves near‑real‑time recommendations and cuts engineering effort with Stitch

Stitch provides a Calm data pipeline

Calm is a mobile mindfulness app with over 26 million downloads that offers guided meditations and subscription features. As its content library and user base grew, Calm needed near‑real‑time replication of tagged content and user favorites (stored in PostgreSQL) into an Amazon Redshift warehouse to power better recommendations, but its small engineering team found custom ETL jobs time‑consuming and lacked bandwidth to build and maintain pipelines or hire additional staff.

Calm adopted Stitch (a Talend company) to handle cloud ETL, which was set up in days and allowed non‑engineers to configure integrations. The switch saved roughly a month of backend engineering work per data source, reduced infrastructure costs by eliminating nightly EC2 jobs, accelerated support analytics by about six months, and enabled broader data‑driven reporting and plans for machine learning across additional data sources.

Calm

Mark Marcantano

Senior DevOps Engineer