A Festival Poster App That Outgrew Its Creator’s Expectations
When Anshay Saboo, a computer science student at USC, built Instafest, his goal was simple: let users generate a festival-style poster from their top artists on Spotify, Apple Music, or Last.fm. What happened next was anything but simple. Launched on November 22nd, 2022, the site drew a modest 100–150 users per hour on day one. By day two that number hit 500, and by day three it reached 2,000. The following Sunday, Instafest was adding 70,000 users per hour.
The surge didn’t stop there. After celebrities including QuestLove, rapper 24KGoldn, director Edgar Wright, and YouTuber Matt King shared the site, traffic spiked to 500,000 new users per hour. That week, Instafest logged over 100 million page views.
“I never expected Instafest to grow as quickly as it did. I couldn’t believe how well Vercel and Next.js handled the enormous scale with ease.”
— Anshay Saboo, Creator of Instafest
Why Next.js Made the Site Feel Instant
Saboo knew he wanted to build with React, choosing Next.js to “make the application snappy and responsive.” The core challenge was rendering festival posters quickly while loading custom web fonts. Next.js handled both through its built-in font optimization and its Image component, which automatically serves images in modern formats like .avif and .webp to cut file sizes.
The framework also generates multiple responsive image sizes on the fly. That meant Instafest could deliver the appropriately scaled image to each visitor’s device, reducing bandwidth and preventing layout shift during page loads—two factors that keep perceived performance high even under massive concurrent traffic.
Scaling Without Provisioning a Single Server
Saboo deployed on Vercel to get the application online quickly. The platform’s serverless functions let Instafest scale automatically, with no need to manage servers, configure load balancers, or upgrade hardware. During the peak of virality, the site handled up to 6 million users per day without downtime or measurable latency increases.
“Vercel was the key to Instafest’s successful launch. Being able to easily deploy code, as well as instantly rollback when things went wrong, was crucial.”
— Anshay Saboo, Creator of Instafest
Vercel’s global Edge Network cached both static assets and function responses, keeping the app highly available worldwide. With Vercel Monitoring, Saboo could visualize traffic segmented by Edge Network region, while Vercel Analytics provided real-user performance data from Core Web Vitals field measurements.
