Case Study | Technology
Scaling Social Impact Through Digital Transformation
Improving platform performance, scalability, and user engagement by modernizing a global crowdfunding platform.
Improving platform performance, scalability, and user engagement by modernizing a global crowdfunding platform.
Improved Performance Platform stability maintained during high-traffic donation campaigns
Accelerated Releases Faster feature deployment through independent microservices scaling
Increased Engagement Mobile-first donor experience via native iOS app
LaunchGood is a global crowdfunding platform purpose-built for social good, serving millions of donors and campaign creators worldwide. Founded on the mission of empowering communities to fund meaningful causes, LaunchGood enables individuals, nonprofits, and community organizations to raise money for charity, disaster relief, education, healthcare, and social impact initiatives. With a user base scaling across the globe and campaigns running 24/7 across time zones, the platform handles high-volume donation traffic and must deliver a seamless, trustworthy experience to donors and campaigners. As its community grew, LaunchGood needed a technology upgrade capable of scaling its ambitions.
LaunchGood’s legacy codebase had become a serious bottleneck to growth. Built on an older monolithic architecture, the platform struggled to handle traffic spikes during high-profile donation campaigns — the exact moments when reliability mattered most. Performance degradation during peak periods risked donor trust and directly threatened the platform’s core mission: connecting donors to causes without friction or failure.
The tightly coupled monolithic system also made it difficult to ship new features at the pace the business required. Any change to one part of the platform risked destabilizing other components, creating a slow, risk-averse release cycle that held back product innovation. The engineering team needed a way to build and deploy independently, without each release becoming a company-wide coordination effort.
Compounding the infrastructure challenge was a critical gap in mobile engagement. LaunchGood’s donor community was increasingly mobile-first, yet the platform had no native mobile application. Without a dedicated iOS experience, the platform could not deliver the intuitive, campaign-discovery-driven engagement that modern donors expected — limiting the platform’s ability to grow its supporter base and drive repeat donations.
10Pearls partnered with LaunchGood to lead a full-scale platform transformation built on AWS.
The solution replaced the legacy monolith with a modern, service-oriented architecture, and introduced a native iOS mobile application — all while maintaining continuity for millions of active users. At the core of the solution:
10Pearls decomposed LaunchGood’s monolithic codebase into a scalable, independently deployable microservices architecture hosted on AWS.
The microservices architecture enabled independent scaling, enabling a viral campaign driving thousands of simultaneous donations no longer risked bringing down unrelated platform functions.
10Pearls overhauled LaunchGood’s application layer with an industry-standard, production-proven tech stack designed for speed, maintainability, and developer velocity.
Standardizing on NestJS and Next.js gave the engineering team a consistent, well-documented foundation, reducing onboarding time and accelerating future development cycles.
With millions of donors and campaign creators transacting on the platform, secure and frictionless authentication was non-negotiable.
LaunchGood advanced security measures like Cloudflare protection and device fingerprinting added substantial value to the platform by enhancing reliability and compliance.
To close the mobile engagement gap, 10Pearls designed and developed a native iOS application that brought LaunchGood’s crowdfunding experience directly to donors’ smartphones.
The mobile app transformed LaunchGood’s engagement model, giving the platform a dedicated mobile presence and opening a high-growth acquisition channel with donors who prefer to give on the go.
Modernizing a live platform serving millions of active users required a careful, risk-managed approach to migration.
By phasing the migration, 10Pearls ensured that LaunchGood’s donors experienced zero downtime and no degradation in service throughout the full platform rebuild.
The transformation delivered immediate, measurable improvements across platform performance, development velocity, and donor engagement. By migrating to a containerized microservices architecture on Amazon ECS, LaunchGood gained the ability to scale individual services independently, eliminating the performance bottlenecks and handling peak load with stability, ensuring donors can give without interruption during the moments that matter most.
Deployment cycles accelerated significantly. The shift from a monolithic release model to independent service deployments helped LaunchGood’s engineering team can ship new features faster, with lower risk and less cross-team coordination overhead.
The native iOS application opened a new engagement channel for LaunchGood’s growing mobile-first donor community. With an intuitive campaign discovery and donation experience purpose-built for mobile, LaunchGood is now positioned to improve donor relationships, increase repeat giving, and grow its supporter base globally, all underpinned by a secure, scalable, AWS-native platform built for the long term.
10Pearls is an award-winning, AI-native digital development company headquartered in Washington, D.C., with delivery centers across the United States, Latin America, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan. The company specializes in product strategy, software engineering, data and analytics, cloud modernization, and AI solutions for clients across healthcare, energy, financial services, technology, and other industries. As an established AWS Partner, 10Pearls brings deep expertise in designing and delivering cloud-native solutions on AWS, helping enterprises migrate, modernize, and innovate at scale. 10Pearls holds AWS Partner status and has a proven track record of delivering high-impact AWS engagements across data engineering, application modernization, and managed cloud services.
Global crowdfunding platform
Contact us today to learn how we can transform your products or ideas into scalable solutions that drive business value and growth.