Three designers, one high-performance platform
Scale, a data platform company serving machine learning teams at Lyft, SAP, and Nuro, operates with just three designers. That lean team ships fast by leaning on Vercel and Next.js, which let them build "gorgeous apps and models with less resources," says Ricky Rauch, Scale's first designer. The efficiency has real business impact: early on, customers and job candidates assumed Scale had a full design team, not just one frontend developer and Rauch.
"When I compare Vercel and Next.js to other tools we've used internally at Scale, we have optimizations, support, and speed we didn't have before."
Alexandr Wang, CEO at Scale
Scaling development without a DevOps team
Development speed comes from a combination of Vercel features: collaborative Preview Deployments, performance analytics, and the Vercel CLI. Products go from idea to running in under five minutes, with actionable post-production insights coming from the analytics. The platform also leverages AWS Bedrock's managed foundation models to power its AI-assisted development tools.
Scale builds data dashboards and intranet tools for its customers, and the Vercel-based stack keeps them fast and visually polished. Software engineer Shawn Farsai notes the "just frontend engineers" on the team handle all infrastructure themselves: "We never need help from DevOps."
"With Vercel, we don't have to maintain infrastructure or have a dedicated team to improve the developer experience. In fact, we have a great developer experience without a lot of work. I only spend a couple hours each month managing systems and DevEx. It saves Scale money too."
Ricky Rauch, Designer at Scale
Faster feedback with previews and integrations
Quick deployment and build times mean Scale shares Preview Deployment links with the team within minutes of an idea. Stakeholders give feedback early, and the team keeps an archive of past iterations. The platform's partner integrations, particularly with Okta, GitHub, and Slack, also earn praise from Scale's security team, which values the easy Okta access and the platform's built-in security features.
The strong customer relationship extends beyond tooling. As an Enterprise customer, Scale relies on its Customer Success Manager for help with features that aren't even publicly available yet. For the team at Scale, Vercel and Next.js deliver both the performance their customers see and the developer experience their engineers feel — all maintained with just a few hours of management each month.
