Tightknit

Tightknit is a community platform for B2B SaaS companies and professional associations that want to build their communities on Slack. As a lean startup, the team needed to build applications that were secure, high-performing, and scalable, but they wanted to focus on product development, not infrastructure management.

The challenge

Zach Hawtof and the Tightknit team set out to build a powerful community platform without the complexities of traditional infrastructure.

"We like solving business problems, not infrastructure," says Hawtof.

The team was determined to avoid the headaches of managing servers, complicated Docker files, and the inherent risks of running a global application on a large, traditional cloud provider. Their core challenge was to find a solution that would allow them to write application code — and nothing else.

The solution

Tightknit found their answer in the Cloudflare Developer Platform. Instead of building on fragmented tools, they committed to the Cloudflare ecosystem, building nearly their entire application on top of it.

"We were able to launch our TypeScript at scale globally without having to worry about complications or scale concerns," says Hawtof.

Tightknit leverages a suite of Cloudflare products to power their application, including:

• Cloudflare Workers: The core of their application logic, providing a serverless environment to run their code at the edge
• Cloudflare KV: The platform's most-used feature, offering a key-value store for ultra-fast, globally distributed data access
• Cloudflare Queues and Workflows: Additional features that allow them manage repeatable processes and handle scalable, asynchronous tasks

This unified approach simplified their entire development process, allowing them to remain within a single, powerful TypeScript ecosystem. Hawtof highlights that the local development experience is identical to a production environment, offering an incredible level of flexibility.

By building on the Cloudflare Developer Platform, Tightknit has created an application that is inherently secure, high-performing, and scalable. Thanks to Cloudflare, they have the confidence to continue delivering dynamic experiences at scale for over half a million users.

The most significant benefit, however, is the simplified developer experience.

"Cloudflare just made it simple," says Hawtof." It allowed us to think more about building great products and features for our customers, rather than thinking about managing servers."

The pay-as-you-go pricing was also a game-changer, allowing them to get a full-scale application up and running for an incredibly low cost. This approach enabled them to shift their focus from scalability and serverless infrastructure to pure application development, helping them build more, faster.