case study

Transform your training into rewards, perks, and benefits.

Henry Garrett

Founding Engineer

“"Stacktape (the product) and Stacktape (the team) have helped us move extremely fast. They abstract away so much of the complexity of AWS, and let us focus on our application logic, instead of infrastructure configuration. The team is second to none, hopping in to be true partners with us on our development journey. We would not be where we are today without Stacktape. "”

Overview

Receipts is a move to earn app that rewards users for working out. We gamify the experience through challenges and streaks to make it fun, competitive, and social. Users earn points for verified elevated heart rate via wearables, and can redeem those points for perks, rewards, and experiences.

We are a seed stage funded team that uses React Native to deliver an iOS app (and Android in the future!), with a backend powered by AWS technologies. With the exception of the API, our backend utilizes as many serverless technologies as possible.

Tech Stack

• React Native
• Expo
• Typescript
• GraphQL
• Node.js
• Prisma
• PostgreSQL
• GraphQL
• AWS RDS, ECS, Lambda, S3, SQS, EventBridge, Cloudfront

Challenges

At Receipts, we were starting totally from scratch, so I was able to take learnings from previous companies/systems, and apply them to the tool choices here. In particular, I had used Terraform in the past for managing cloud resources. While its flexibility, multi-cloud support, and provider ecosystem were great, it tended to come with more complexity than needed, causing slower developer cycle time. For a brand new company, iterating quickly, we don't need the endless flexibility of a tool like that (or other IaaC tools, for that matter), but we do want the benefits that IaaC brings like repeatability, atomic updates, code colocation, etc. However, we need speed as well, so sensible defaults or abstractions on top of a base IaaC layer is an enabler that can accelerate our speed to market.

Another concern I had was around vendor lock-in. I'm always weary of deploying entirely via a PaaS provider, as the costs usually scale faster than your traffic. Then, if you reach optimal scale, usually the expandable services the PaaS offers don't meet your needs.

Why Stacktape?

Thoughtful abstractions that let you focus on your application, not infrastructure engineering. “Just spin up an auto-scaling web service for me”.

Freedom and ownership over our own resources. The peace of mind that comes with having our infrastructure in our own AWS account is a paradigm that I will never be able to reverse.

Full power of AWS. Allowing the option to use the full power of AWS lets us naturally expand as necessary. We would never have to migrate off of Stacktape at scale, since we have the power of AWS at our fingertips.