How The Coupon Bureau built a real-time universal digital coupon platform on AWS

This is a guest post written by The Coupon Bureau, an AWS customer

The Coupon Bureau (TCB) is modernizing how coupons work in the US with the first universal digital coupon standard: AI (8112). To make this possible, TCB needed to build a system that could support billions of coupon transactions in real time, integrate seamlessly with hundreds of providers and retailers, and deliver mission-critical reliability. By using services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), TCB designed a cloud-based architecture that processes high-volume events, delivers real-time webhook notifications, provides data recovery during outages, and scales seamlessly as adoption grows.

The Coupon Bureau is a nonprofit serving as the central exchange for digital coupons in the US market. Its mission is to improve coupon accuracy, eliminate fraud, and give retailers, manufacturers, and consumers a reliable, interoperable standard. The 8112 digital coupon standard enables coupons to be issued, shared, and redeemed across multiple providers and retailers, ensuring consumers can use offers anywhere while giving brands accurate real-time redemption data.

The challenge

The system needed to be able to handle significant scale and volume, managing billions of coupon lifecycle events per year. Each lifecycle included issuance, redemption, sharing, and revocation. Low latency was critical, with coupon redemption decisions required under 200 milliseconds (ms) to avoid slowing checkout lines at the point of sale. Reliability was paramount, as missing or duplicated redemptions could erode trust. The system had to recover millions of redemption records without downtime. Additionally, the integration complexity was high, with hundreds of providers, apps, and retailers requiring standardized APIs and real-time webhooks to avoid brittle point-to-point integrations.

Why AWS

TCB decided to use AWS services because AWS could deliver scalable, event-driven architecture and provide global availability.

The system leveraged AWS services to meet various critical needs. Elastic scaling allowed the system to handle unpredictable transaction spikes during promotions seamlessly. Managed services such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon EventBridge reduced operational overhead, enabling the team to focus on industry innovation rather than infrastructure management. Reliability and fault tolerance were enabled through Multi-AZ deployments, which guaranteed zero data loss in the event of failures. Additionally, security and compliance were addressed using AWS services like AWS Identity Access Management (IAM) and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), meeting the stringent requirements of major consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers and national retailers.

As Abhijit Das, CTO of The Coupon Bureau said, “TCB uses more than 18 AWS services to power the infrastructure that achieves what the nation wants. AWS offers the broadest set of services that fit seamlessly into our technology stack, allowing a lean team to deliver national-scale impact.”

Lean team, massive impact

Behind this national-scale infrastructure is a remarkably lean technology team. Instead of hundreds of engineers, TCB operates its entire platform with fewer than 10 engineers. The breadth of AWS services makes this possible. With managed building blocks—spanning compute, storage, orchestration, monitoring, and security—TCB avoids the burden of building infrastructure from scratch. Each AWS service integrates seamlessly, which means the team can focus on innovation over operations.

As CTO, Abhijit Das has led this strategy, proving that with AWS, a compact, mission-driven team can operate infrastructure at the scale of a national utility.

Stress testing results on AWS

To validate that the infrastructure could meet national-scale demands, TCB conducted rigorous stress testing using JMeter distributed across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Each EC2 instance simulated 150 concurrent threads, and the team used horizontal scaling to generate arbitrarily high loads. Orchestration was fully automated:

The process begins with AWS Lambda monitoring the execution status across EC2 instances. Once the monitoring is complete, the test results are copied to Amazon S3. Subsequently, another Lambda function automatically merges these results. Finally, consolidated reports are generated for thorough analysis.

Test configurations

The test configurations vary based on the number of servers and the corresponding load. The configurations are as follows:

• 8 servers – Small load
• 14 servers – Medium load
• 26 servers – Large load
• 44 servers – Extra-large load

Observations

The platform demonstrated exceptional performance under varying loads. Throughput scaled linearly with load; every time the load doubled, throughput doubled without impacting latency. Latency and response times remained stable across all tests, even under the largest load. At maximum scale, the platform consistently processed 10,000 requests per second, with headroom to grow further.

The following figure illustrates the time it takes to respond to different sizes of coupon request.

Figure 1: Response time compared to requests

Outcomes

This testing proved that the TCB platform on AWS could scale seamlessly to meet billions of coupon lifecycle events annually. The optimization at every layer—from EC2 orchestration, Lambda automation, event-driven analytics, and DynamoDB backed lookups—provided performance stability even under extreme conditions.

As Abhijit Das observed, “Our optimization at every step of the infrastructure layer worked seamlessly and helped us achieve this scale. The architecture is flexible enough to add more Regions as adoption grows.”

The platform achieves a remarkable 99.99 percent uptime across redemption APIs, minimizing disruptions and maintaining consistent service availability. Redemption latency at checkout is under 200 ms, enabling swift and efficient transactions. The system excels in handling high traffic volumes with tenfold elastic scaling during peak promotions, adapting to increased demand without compromising performance. Even under peak load conditions, the system maintains stable response times, guaranteeing a smooth and responsive user interface. These features collectively contribute to a robust and dependable system capable of meeting the demands of dynamic and high-traffic environments.

The Coupon Bureau’s AWS architecture is more than a coupon platform—it’s a blueprint for real-time, trust-driven commerce ecosystems. Retailers experience frictionless redemption, reduced fraud, and faster checkout processes, enhancing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands benefit from unified redemption data across channels, enabling more accurate and insightful return on investment (ROI) measurement. This data-driven approach allows brands to optimize their strategies and maximize their marketing efforts. Consumers enjoy reliable coupon experiences across various apps, retailers, and regions—giving them consistent and trustworthy interactions with promotional offers.

This work shows how AWS helps vertical-specific nonprofits and consortiums build national-scale, mission-critical infrastructure with small, agile teams.

Conclusion

By using AWS managed services, The Coupon Bureau has delivered the first real-time universal coupon exchange on a national scale. The architecture demonstrates how AWS can power low-latency, high-reliability, globally distributed transaction systems in industries where trust and speed are paramount.

If you’re building large-scale, mission-critical ecosystems in retail, CPG, or beyond, explore how DynamoDB, Lambda, and EventBridge can help you scale like The Coupon Bureau.

To learn more, visit The Coupon Bureau Developer Portal or connect with the author of this post on LinkedIn.