Morning Brew’s Move to a Composable, Headless Stack
Morning Brew, a collective of media brands serving modern business leaders, has scaled from a simple email newsletter into a global operation spanning YouTube, live events, and podcasts. The company’s growth is emblematic of what a modern media pipeline can achieve: it generated $50 million in revenue in 2021—more than double the prior year’s $20 million—and was later acquired by Insider Inc. Today, the brand connects with over 18 million users monthly.
The rapid expansion has been powered by a critical infrastructure shift. Morning Brew migrated from a rigid architecture storing HTML directly in SQL to a headless composable stack built on Next.js, Vercel’s frontend cloud, and Sanity’s content cloud. The move yielded a 2.5x revenue increase and a 100% cache hit rate, enabled by Vercel’s on-demand Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR).
Replacing a Rigid Monolith with Composable Content
Before scaling, Morning Brew faced a fundamental problem: storing HTML in SQL created roadblocks to collaboration and made launching new brands a heavy lift. The team’s small engineering group needed a more flexible, customizable frontend that could keep pace with their growth strategy.
By treating content as structured data rather than hardcoded HTML, Morning Brew freed its editors to focus on creation while developers could iterate without wrestling a monolith. This architectural change gave the team the ability to spin up new websites and lines of business rapidly, moving from concept to execution in minutes.
“By thinking of content as data and removing the HTML semantics, we can let editors and content creators do what they do best.”
Drew Monroe, Director of Engineering
Core Features Powering Fast, Scalable Publishing
Morning Brew leans on three key Vercel capabilities to maintain speed and developer experience across its properties.
On-Demand ISR for Instant Content Updates
The team relies heavily on Vercel’s on-demand ISR, which enables content updates without a full site redeploy. This approach rehydrates content dynamically, ensuring end users always see the latest version as changes propagate instantaneously. The result: a perfect 100% cache hit rate while keeping the live site perpetually fresh.
Serverless Functions for High-Traffic Resilience
Morning Brew’s platform handles roughly 15 million cache requests and 2 million Serverless Function invocations per month, delivering fast page loads even under heavy load. According to Monroe, the serverless compute model scales up and down seamlessly, and the edge CDN serves content “blazingly fast, regardless of where people are located.”
Preview Deployments for Cross-Team Collaboration
Developers can generate Preview URLs automatically, sending them to content creators and editors for real-time feedback. With built-in commenting on previews, product managers, designers, and editorial staff can assess how a piece of content or a design element fits into the broader site schema. This transparency breaks down silos between teams and lets stakeholders join the development conversation without friction.
Morning Brew’s transition to a headless architecture illustrates how a composable content approach can accelerate development velocity without compromising performance. By decoupling content from presentation and layering in ISR, serverless functions, and preview workflows, the company gained the agility to expand its brand portfolio while keeping page loads fast and developers productive.
