Superwall case study

PlanetScale gives Superwall a scalable platform to handle huge growth trajectory

Superwall helps consumer applications increase revenue via their paywalls. Using Superwall allows organizations to optimize their pricing, design, copy, and other facets of the paywalls that their applications present to end users. They built their product on top of PlanetScale from the beginning. The familiarity of MySQL combined with the scalability of Vitess was attractive for the Superwall team, as they had ambitions to scale. Today, Superwall helps manage paywalls that are viewed by millions of end users all around the world.

PlanetScale at Superwall

Brian Anglin and his co-founder at Superwall chose to build their product on top of a PlanetScale database from the get-go due to the familiarity of MySQL, the scalability of Vitess, and the talented team of engineers behind the product. At this point, PlanetScale was still in beta. However, Superwall saw the incredible potential of building with PlanetScale and have been able to leverage many of our platform's innovative features to help them create a world-class product.

Superwall helps consumer applications increase revenue by optimizing their paywalls to maximize revenue. To date, Superwall has displayed over 1 billion paywalls, displays approximately 1 million paywalls per day, and produces hundreds of thousands of monthly customer conversions. They use PlanetScale as a foundational component of the infrastructure to power this.

Choosing a database platform

Brian knew the challenges of managing and scaling databases from his years at GitHub. Running a reliable and performant MySQL instance on its own can be a challenge, let alone at scale for a large organization like GitHub. Superwall had ambitions to scale to reach billions of end-users, and wanted to choose a platform that would have no trouble scaling with their growth.

"We are a relatively small team, but our customer's customers, the end users of this app, is on the scale of billions. We wanted something were we could start small... but could scale to as many users as we needed."

Brian evaluated several options. However, given the existing experience with MySQL, building on top of a SQL database was most appealing. Ultimately, they chose to build with PlanetScale. Over the past several years, their product grown significantly, and PlanetScale's promise of near-infinite scale has held true.

"PlanetScale was the perfect fit for that because it was the promise and familiarity of MySQL with the unlimited scale of Vitess"

Tools to improve product development

One of Superwall's favorite features of PlanetScale is branching and deploy requests. They have built a seamless database DevOps workflow by integrating PlanetScale branching into their development workflow via GitHub Actions. Whenever they create a new pull request, they automatically create a new branch in PlanetScale via our API. This provides a fresh code and database environment for every new feature they want to create.

This flow scales with their team as they grow. Each individual contributor can have their own development environment, with isolated branches, allowing them to work with minimal conflicts and maximum speed.

"That's something that was unique to PlanetScale. I don't think at the time, there was anyone else who was providing that sort of functionality."

Support when it counts

Superwall has interacted with PlanetScale support on many occasions, and has had many positive experiences. From simple database questions to helping improve database performance, the PlanetScale support team always provides helpful and knowledgeable responses.

"We can ask a complicated question that's super bespoke and unique to our situation and really get investment from the PlanetScale team to help solve whatever we're trying to figure out."

Overall, the team at Superwall has been happy with PlanetScale's reliability, as well as the help they have received along the journey of building their organization.