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Customer Story

Subscription pioneer Bango races to the cloud with AWS

by AWS Editorial Team | 15 August 2025 | Thought Leadership

Overview

Today’s customers are chasing convenience, choice, and control in everything they purchase. But when it comes to subscriptions, consumers are often left juggling multiple providers and platforms in streaming, gaming, lifestyle, utilities, and more. In the quest for a simpler way to manage subscriptions, they are increasingly looking to consolidate their subscriptions through a bundling platform. While offering more control and flexibility for consumers, bundling also boosts revenue and customer loyalty for subscription providers.

Bango is a leading subscription bundling and payments company. Its core solution is the Digital Vending Machine® (DVM™), a software technology that allows content providers to sell their products as bundled offers through indirect channels. David Haughton, VP of Engineering at Bango, explains “We are transforming the subscriptions economy. So, anything you can subscribe to can be managed through the DVM.”

Bango also supports more convenient and flexible payments, helping consumers pay for goods and services through alternative methods. For example, a user can pay for something by charging it to their mobile phone bill, meaning they can complete the transaction without a payment card or bank account.

Business people listening in meeting

The motivation to modernize

As the Bango team was developing the DVM, they realized they needed to future-proof—and fast. Bango wanted to speed up the execution of new features and capabilities. After recently acquiring another company, the software company went from just one technology stack to five, making modernization even more complex.

“What that meant was our products and services needed to scale up to 365 times capacity to support the volume of traffic we needed to get the data into the new technology,” says Haughton.

While some organizations can simply lift and shift their systems to the cloud, Bango realized this wouldn’t solve the business’ speed and execution challenges in the long term. After careful consideration, the business embarked on the alternative path—replatforming.

Rapid replatforming

By using the scale and technology provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bango could replatform at lightning speed. The company consolidated five sets of technology into one, minimizing technical complexity. Migration felt less like a marathon and more like a sprint, as Bango migrated billions of transactions and data points in a matter of hours.

Haughton explains, “If you think about the amount of data that spans over the course of 12 to 18 months, we’re doing that in one to two hours. And that scale would never have been possible if we hadn’t chosen a cloud provider such as AWS.”

New customers and capabilities

Bango saw three key benefits after migrating to AWS Cloud:

  • Deeper knowledge
  • Scaled-up services
  • Global reach

By plugging into the wide-reaching expertise of AWS, Bango has freed up time to focus on running and improving its core products. “We were able to adopt things like cloud databases and cloud streaming technologies quickly, based on the documentation and support from the AWS team. But we haven’t had to grow our own depth of knowledge in those areas. They are just ready to use,” says Haughton. With the AWS team on hand to manage and maintain supporting infrastructure, Bango can concentrate on boosting its business’s growth.

Bango has also been able to expand and flex its product offering with cutting-edge technologies. With hundreds of out-of-the-box services available from AWS, Bango has been able to prioritize customer experience instead of infrastructure management. For example, Bango uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to reduce operational overhead. “We've used EKS to expedite our set up of Kubernetes and allow our teams to be successful in adopting that technology. Otherwise, we'd just be in an endless loop of trying to keep the system running, rather than supporting our teams,” explains Haughton.

The Bango team also identified instances of customers accidentally sending duplicate requests. By adopting the easy-to-manage Amazon ElastiCache, Bango could prevent these requests, adding another feature to its ever-evolving technology stack. With AWS acting as a one-stop shop for any emerging business needs, Bango has significantly shrunk its development cycles.

Now that new infrastructure can be spun up quickly, Bango has been able to expand its customer reach. Where new regions would previously only be accessible through months of on-the-ground effort, now Bango can now use automated processes to expand into new geographies quicker. And Bango customers are benefiting from the modernization with AWS too, as the company has been able to reduce end-to-end latency by 60 percent, boosting service quality.

Exploring future opportunities

Bango is now equipped to deliver a wider range of capabilities than ever before. Haughton says, “The benefit of using AWS is it’s almost like a supermarket of technology. If we have a use case, we know something is going to be there to suit our needs.”

With the latest innovations, regular technology reviews, and support from the AWS team, Bango is now ready to usher in the subscription revolution. Next, the team is planning to adopt Amazon SageMaker, one of the readily available data, analytics, and AI services provided by AWS. Amazon SageMaker will help Bango drive data accessibility and automate its customer offering, without requiring a complex set-up. Haughton adds, “We know that the connections and the technology we have are really starting to drive the subscription economy. The next step is using the data to help guide the trends of the future.”