Inside Stripe's live Black Friday dashboard, built in 19 days

During Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2023, businesses moved more than $18.6 billion through Stripe. Just 19 days before the shopping event, a cross-functional Stripe team asked a question: could they open up their core metrics and show the public a live look at their reliability, transaction volumes, and global activity?

The answer was a real-time microsite built on Vercel that handled more than 17 million edge requests at launch with 100% uptime. Instead of architecting a custom dynamic cache from scratch, the team leaned on Vercel's framework-defined infrastructure and focused on design, performance, and reliability.

“This would not have been possible without Vercel. Certainly not within 19 days.”—Sam McAllister, Stripe

Balancing live data with a fast first load

The core engineering problem was reconciling a fast initial page load with responsive interactions, all while managing heavily dynamic components. A per-client WebSocket approach was considered first, but given the timeline and expected traffic, the team instead combined client-side polling with frequent cache rehydration.

The architecture broke down into three layers:

  • getStaticProps (gSP): Fetched static data at build time so the data needed for the first render was pre-fetched and ready.
  • Stale-While-Revalidate (SWR): Managed real-time data and interactions on the client side, showing the latest information while triggering background revalidation. This kept data current without hammering the backend.
  • Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR): Automated revalidation of static content from gSP and SWR, propagating updates automatically across the entire Vercel Edge Network.

For caching, Stripe chose a one-second max-age. This let the app serve static pages with minimal backend queries: users hit cached pages while content updated in the background, allowing the system to handle millions of requests during peak demand. Traffic was diverted to Vercel's cache network, and ISR handled background data generation, keeping the live counter smooth without sacrificing overall performance.

Reliability under extreme load

The stakes were high. Stripe’s public brand is built on infrastructure reliability, and during BFCM the company processed a peak of 93,304 transactions per minute while maintaining API uptime above 99.999%. The microsite itself had to demonstrate that reliability while operating under the strictest security measures, ensuring no risk entered the Stripe ecosystem.

The result was a campaign that not only showcased Stripe's resilience but also served as a proof point for Vercel's framework-defined infrastructure: a viral, live-data microsite built and launched in under three weeks.