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Case Study: Magic Circle scaled to 2M games on Neon with an infra bill below $500

Magic Circle Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk
Key facts · TL;DR
Company
Magic Circle
Industry
Social gaming
Challenge
A tiny team needed to absorb spikey traffic and ship fast on a small budget.
Headline result
Magic Circle scaled to 2 million games on Neon and Cloudflare while keeping its infrastructure bill below $500.

Key results

2M
Games played
Players across 30+ countries
<$500
Infrastructure bill
<1 wk
To ship a new game

The challenge

Magic Circle, run by a small team, needed a database that could absorb spikey traffic from its social games and support rapid iteration without a large infrastructure budget.

The solution

Magic Circle built on Neon and Cloudflare Durable Objects, using Neon branching to test code and database migrations in isolation and ship multiple times a day.

“Neon branches are a game changer for this.”

AR
Avi Romanoff
Founder, Magic Circle

The results, in context

Magic Circle reported scaling to 2 million games played across players in 30+ countries while keeping its infrastructure bill below $500, and shipping entirely new games in under a week.

Products used

Neon Neon PostgresNeon Neon Branching