Prezzee Drives Business Transformation and Scales 40x Faster by Modernizing Its Digital Gifting Platform on AWS

A global digital gifting platform, Prezzee is on a mission to ignite human connection through digital gifting experiences. Today, millions of registered users rely on Prezzee to buy, send, and redeem digital gift cards from more than 800 retail brands across 6 countries.

Prezzee’s registered user base has grown tenfold in the past two years. However, the company’s monolithic cloud architecture made it difficult to keep pace with this growth. Aran Flanagan, chief technology officer for Prezzee, explains, “We’ve used AWS since we launched the business in 2014, but our initial deployment was almost like a data center in the cloud as opposed to being cloud native.”

Engineers at Prezzee found themselves spending most of their time building and maintaining servers and using manual configurations. Meanwhile, the company’s systems were starting to struggle with peak throughput, speed, and reliability. “To cope with the demand, we were simply scaling up the servers and databases, which was costly and often ineffective,” recalls Flanagan.

In addition, Prezzee wanted to increase its overall system availability. “It’s a digital world, and as more people gift across borders, we need to be reliable and always available when our customers need us,” says Flanagan.

To overcome these challenges and better serve its growing customer base, Prezzee decided to adopt a serverless approach to its AWS technology stack. “We knew that to grow effectively, we needed to reinvent our approach to technology and move to a more modern, leading-edge architecture based on serverless technology,” says Flanagan.

Through talks with the AWS account team, serverless specialists, and other AWS customers, Prezzee transformed the way its teams approach problems. “It was a true collaboration with AWS, from aligning on the vision through to the technology strategy,” Flanagan says. “Throughout our close collaboration with AWS, we were introduced to implementation partners, who brought the expertise plus the additional scale to do the work while still developing our platform’s capabilities. We now engineer for scale, with a curious mindset that embraces experimentation, pushes boundaries, and trials new technology.”

Prezzee runs its entire business on AWS—including websites, eCommerce, billing, inventory management, supply chain integration, customer integrations, customer care, data warehouse and analytics, and security services. As part of its modernization efforts, the company has moved to serverless capabilities running on AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate micro-containers. These are deployed in a combination of regional data hubs and global shared services to provide low latency, high performance, and shared components. Prezzee uses Amazon Aurora for primary transactional databases and Amazon DynamoDB for global serverless structured storage, with Amazon Redshift operating as a data warehouse and machine learning staging area.

Using AWS serverless technologies, Prezzee has increased its scalability and can better meet its global business growth. “Prezzee is currently used by global businesses, and the platform is now designed to support even more companies and partners worldwide. In the past, we often reached peak capacity, which is measured in gifts per second. Now, we’ve increased that level fortyfold, with the ability to scale further on demand,” says Flanagan. “Global companies value Prezzee’s speed and reliability, and it’s great to be in a position where we’re ahead of customer demand.”

Flanagan cites a recent example of a customer that had previously used other platforms to unsuccessfully attempt large-scale customer giveaways. “They simply couldn’t scale with other technology vendors. They worked with us, and we easily managed the scale when 70,000 free gifts were offered and demand spiked,” says Flanagan. “We wouldn’t have dreamed of taking on something like this prior to our AWS modernization work.”

The company’s new architecture—and accompanying change in culture—has also created a more engaging and conducive technology environment for engineers, accelerating time to market for new features and services. “Using AWS serverless technology, we spend less time on undifferentiated heavy lifting,” says Flanagan. “For example, we’ve reduced the time required to build and launch new services. As a result, we’ve reduced our time to market by about 67 percent and invested the time saved to develop more services, such as advanced security and fraud prevention capabilities.”

Prezzee has also gained time to focus on innovation. “With our platform’s newly enhanced performance and availability, we’ve been able to co-create new revenue streams with our customers,” Flanagan says. In addition, Prezzee has improved availability from 98.5 percent to 99.99 percent thanks to a fault-tolerant architectural design, helping the company reduce the number of technical incidents by over 90 percent.

Prezzee is continuing its modernization efforts by exploring AWS generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) services such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q, a generative AI–powered assistant. “Customer care is one of our competitive differentiators, and we look forward to transforming that function with Amazon Connect, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon Q,” Flanagan concludes. “It’s great to know AWS will be with us as we continue to transform our technology stack to deliver new capabilities and products, support global expansion, and ‘give magic’ to our customers.”