Case Study | Technology
Scaling Social Impact Through Digital Transformation
Improving platform performance, scalability, and user engagement by modernizing a global crowdfunding platform.
Improved Performance
Platform stability maintained during
high-traffic donation campaigns
Accelerated Releases Faster feature deployment through independent microservices scaling
Increased Engagement Mobile-first donor experience via native iOS app
About the Customer
The customer is a global crowdfunding platform purpose-built for social good, serving millions of donors and campaign creators worldwide. Founded on the mission of empowering communities to fund meaningful causes, the company enables individuals, nonprofits, and community organizations to raise money for charity, disaster relief, education, healthcare, and social impact initiatives. With a user base scaling across the globe and campaigns running 24/7 across time zones, the platform handles high-volume donation traffic and must deliver a seamless, trustworthy experience to donors and campaigners. As its community grew, the customer needed a technology upgrade capable of scaling its ambitions.
Customer Challenge
The company’s legacy codebase had become a serious bottleneck to growth. Built on an older monolithic architecture, the platform struggled to handle traffic spikes during high-profile donation campaigns — the exact moments when reliability mattered most. Performance degradation during peak periods risked donor trust and directly threatened the platform’s core mission: connecting donors to causes without friction or failure.
The tightly coupled monolithic system also made it difficult to ship new features at the pace the business required. Any change to one part of the platform risked destabilizing other components, creating a slow, risk-averse release cycle that held back product innovation. The engineering team needed a way to build and deploy independently, without each release becoming a company-wide coordination effort.
Compounding the infrastructure challenge was a critical gap in mobile engagement. The company’s donor community was increasingly mobile-first, yet the platform had no native mobile application. Without a dedicated iOS experience, the platform could not deliver the intuitive, campaign-discovery-driven engagement that modern donors expected — limiting the platform’s ability to grow its supporter base and drive repeat donations.
Partner Solution
10Pearls partnered with the company to lead a full-scale platform transformation built on AWS.
The solution replaced the legacy monolith with a modern, service-oriented architecture, and introduced a native iOS mobile application — all while maintaining continuity for millions of active users. At the core of the solution:
Rebuilding the Platform on a Modern Microservices Architecture
10Pearls decomposed the company‘s monolithic codebase into a scalable, independently deployable microservices architecture hosted on AWS.
- Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) orchestrated containerized microservices using Docker, enabling each service to scale independently based on load — ensuring platform stability even during peak donation surges
- Amazon API Gateway provided a unified, secure entry point for all client-facing API traffic, managing routing, throttling, and authorization across services
- Amazon CloudFront served as the content delivery network, accelerating page load times and asset delivery for a globally distributed donor base
- AWS Lambda handled event-driven processing tasks — including donation confirmations, notifications, and background data operations — without requiring always-on infrastructure
The microservices architecture enabled independent scaling, enabling a viral campaign driving thousands of simultaneous donations no longer risked bringing down unrelated platform functions.
Modernizing the Backend and Frontend Tech Stack
10Pearls overhauled the company‘s application layer with an industry-standard, production-proven tech stack designed for speed, maintainability, and developer velocity.
- NestJS powered the backend services, providing a structured, modular framework that standardized API development and made the codebase significantly easier to maintain and extend
- Next.js delivered the frontend, enabling server-side rendering for fast initial page loads and dynamic, SEO-friendly campaign pages that improve discoverability
- An RPC-based API layer streamlined inter-service communication across the microservices, reducing latency and simplifying how components interact
- Load testing was implemented throughout the build cycle to validate performance under simulated peak conditions, ensuring every release met stability thresholds before reaching production
Standardizing on NestJS and Next.js gave the engineering team a consistent, well-documented foundation, reducing onboarding time and accelerating future development cycles.
Securing Donor Identity and Access at Scale
With millions of donors and campaign creators transacting on the platform, secure and frictionless authentication was non-negotiable.
- Amazon Cognito managed user identity, authentication, and authorization across both the web platform and the new iOS application — providing enterprise-grade security with a seamless login experience
- Multi-factor authentication and token-based session management were implemented to protect donor accounts and ensure regulatory compliance
- Unified identity across web and mobile meant a donor authenticated once could move seamlessly between platforms without re-logging in
The company advanced security measures like Cloudflare protection and device fingerprinting added substantial value to the platform by enhancing reliability and compliance.
Dedicated Android and iOS App for Mobile-First Donors
To close the mobile engagement gap, 10Pearls designed and developed a native iOS application that brought the company‘s crowdfunding experience directly to donors’ smartphones.
- Campaign discovery, donation flows, and campaign tracking were reimagined for a mobile-native UX — reducing friction and increasing conversion for mobile donors
- The mobile app is connected to the same AWS-hosted backend services as the web platform, ensuring feature parity and data consistency across all touchpoints
- Push notification capabilities enabled timely campaign updates, donor engagement prompts, and milestone alerts — driving repeat visits and ongoing donor participation
The mobile app transformed the company‘s engagement model, giving the platform a dedicated mobile presence and opening a high-growth acquisition channel with donors who prefer to give on the go.
A Phased, Zero-Disruption Migration Approach
Modernizing a live platform serving millions of active users required a careful, risk-managed approach to migration.
- Pre-implementation discovery mapped all existing integrations, legacy dependencies, and user journeys to ensure nothing was lost in the transition
- Incremental service migration allowed new microservices to run alongside legacy components during the transition, maintaining platform continuity for users throughout
- Post-launch hypercare support from 10Pearls included monitoring, performance tuning, and knowledge transfer — leaving the company‘s team fully equipped to operate the new platform
By phasing the migration, 10Pearls ensured that the company‘s donors experienced zero downtime and no degradation in service throughout the full platform rebuild.
Results and Benefits
The transformation delivered immediate, measurable improvements across platform performance, development velocity, and donor engagement. By migrating to a containerized microservices architecture on Amazon ECS, the company gained the ability to scale individual services independently, eliminating the performance bottlenecks and handling peak load with stability, ensuring donors can give without interruption during the moments that matter most.
Deployment cycles accelerated significantly. The shift from a monolithic release model to independent service deployments helped the company‘s engineering team can ship new features faster, with lower risk and less cross-team coordination overhead.
The native iOS application opened a new engagement channel for the company‘s growing mobile-first donor community. With an intuitive campaign discovery and donation experience purpose-built for mobile, the company is now positioned to improve donor relationships, increase repeat giving, and grow its supporter base globally, all underpinned by a secure, scalable, AWS-native platform built for the long term.
About the Partner
10Pearls is an award-winning, AI-native digital development company headquartered in Washington, D.C., with delivery centers across the United States, Latin America, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan. The company specializes in product strategy, software engineering, data and analytics, cloud modernization, and AI solutions for clients across healthcare, energy, financial services, technology, and other industries. As an established AWS Partner, 10Pearls brings deep expertise in designing and delivering cloud-native solutions on AWS, helping enterprises migrate, modernize, and innovate at scale. 10Pearls holds AWS Partner status and has a proven track record of delivering high-impact AWS engagements across data engineering, application modernization, and managed cloud services.
Customer
Global crowdfunding platform
Services
Tech stack
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