Case Study: Chess.com saves $400K annually with Redpanda BYOC
Key results
The challenge
Chess.com is the world's leading online chess platform, hosting more than 10 million games daily for over 200 million users and relying on Apache Kafka as a critical part of its event-driven infrastructure. It had run on Confluent Cloud for several years, but Confluent had no offering to run within Chess.com's own infrastructure or on Google Cloud Platform. As the business grew, costs escalated and unexpected traffic spikes produced large bills.
The solution
Chess.com selected Redpanda's Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) offering, which runs inside its GCP environment with no network overage charges, and migrated from Confluent in a phased approach that did not interrupt development.
“The idea of building a new feature that could inadvertently trigger expensive overages was incredibly frustrating. Redpanda is predictable and reliable; we don't see surprise overages anymore.”
JKJames KeltyHead of Infrastructure, Chess.com
The results, in context
Chess.com reports it more than doubled its streaming capacity relative to Confluent at a significantly lower price point, cutting costs by at least 40% and projecting to more than $400,000 in savings each year. The company also eliminated surprise network overage charges and gained predictable, reliable scaling for traffic spikes.