Visual site builder cuts pipeline time from 20 minutes to under one

Makeswift, a visual site builder for Next.js used by teams at Caterpillar and Render, was hitting a wall. Their small team was managing a custom build pipeline built on Kubernetes and Bazel, and CI times had crept toward 20 minutes. The development experience was suffering, and the custom infrastructure was getting harder to maintain.

The team’s setup before switching was a "multi-monorepo" approach, using GitHub Actions with file glob filters and carefully orchestrated Docker builds to manage tasks. It mostly worked, but it was brittle and time-consuming. After months of trying to optimize their original architecture, the team decided the configuration burden was too high and began looking for a different solution.

They found it in Turborepo. The migration was quick, and the impact was immediate: Makeswift reports a 65% reduction in overall CI pipeline time. Tasks such as linting, typechecking, building, codegen, dev, generate, pre-commit, and pre-push are now scheduled automatically—both locally and in CI—without developers needing to manage them manually.

"Turborepo just worked. We couldn't have asked for an easier set up, it was great."

Miguel Oller, Cofounder and CEO

Faster iteration, from commit to deploy

Makeswift's developers ship frequently, averaging around 50 builds a day with daily production deployments. The bottleneck used to be the time between committing code and getting it deployed—roughly 20 minutes. With Turborepo, that same path now takes less than one minute.

Because Vercel creates a Preview Deployment for every pull request, the faster pipeline means faster feedback on code reviews and smoother collaboration across the team. The local experience improved as well: developers can now spin up the full end-to-end stack with a single command instead of juggling multiple terminals. That reclaimed time goes back into feature work and release preparation.

Looking ahead

Makeswift was the first Turborepo customer, but they see more room to optimize. The team is planning to adopt Vercel Edge Middleware for multi-tenancy, and they’re exploring internal packages and publishing to npm from their open-source repository.