VercelSusan Aziz4 min readintermediate
How Factory scaled its cloud backend to one billion monthly requests on Vercel
Summary
Factory runs its entire SaaS backend on a single Next.js app deployed to Vercel, handling about a billion API requests per day with 350 ms p95 latency. They achieve this with Vercel’s Fluid compute to avoid cold starts, built‑in observability and WAF for security, and internal automation (“Droids”) that let non‑engineers deploy tools without extra infrastructure.
- Using a single Next.js app on Vercel to serve API routes, middleware, and webhooks can handle ~1 billion daily requests with p95 latency ≤350 ms.
- Fluid compute keeps serverless functions warm, eliminating cold‑start latency for latency‑sensitive workloads.
- Vercel Observability plus the built‑in WAF give real‑time traffic insight and route‑level protection without a dedicated security team.
- Internal “Droids” automate builds and deployments via Vercel’s API, letting non‑technical teams ship dashboards and demos without pulling engineers off product work.
SaaS teams evaluating serverless backends will see how a single Next.js deployment can scale to massive traffic while keeping ops overhead low.
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