How Aryeo Revolutionized Content Management for Real Estate

Aryeo is a SaaS platform that enables real estate professionals and photographers to host and distribute content. Today more than 10,000 agents around the US rely on Aryeo for showcasing their visual content.

The team behind the project couldn’t know their users’ needs better, as they were originally property photographers themselves. At the time, there was no industry-specific content management platform, and they shared photos via good old-fashioned email and general storage sites.

Aryeo was created in 2019 to help real estate photographers and agents collaborate on a completely new level. It streamlined a lot of processes that used to be manual, from delivering content to creating virtual tours and marketing materials.

Aryeo was built for delivering high-resolution professional photographs. These are all 300 DPI images of about 12 MB in size. On average, each user uploads 40 images per property, and Aryeo has to seamlessly process all of them at once and in real time.

When the project started, the team tried building an in-house uploader using open-source packages. The solution worked 95% of the time, but with thousands of uploads the 5% error rate simply wasn’t acceptable. Failed uploads took up the developers’ time and increased the churn rate among customers.

Reliability wasn’t the only issue. Managing a large amount of content required a powerful infrastructure backed up by an advanced CDN. Aryeo didn’t want to spend their time deploying and managing additional servers for this.

After initial trial and error, Aryeo set out on a search for a best-in-class service to replace their error-prone internal solution. They had three main requirements:

Saving time is one of Aryeo’s main values. The platform couldn’t achieve that without a lightning-fast uploader to make images instantly available.

Aryeo’s content base has been skyrocketing from the start. It was essential to find a scalable infrastructure that could adapt to the growing bandwidth.

A time-tested solution with guaranteed results was a must. The team was looking for an infrastructure that ran like clockwork even on high-load projects.

To make the right choice, Aryeo tested a number of third-party providers. Uploadcare crossed the finish line first in a speed test, processing images the fastest. On top of that, it provided the direct-to-S3 integration, which was exactly what the team needed.

Aryeo receives tens of thousands of pieces of content on a daily basis. And as real estate is moving online, this number is continuously growing. Uploadcare uses a reliable storage with 99.9% guaranteed uptime, allowing Aryeo to process a great number of requests even during peak usage times.

Uploadcare enabled Aryeo’s users to upload multiple high-resolution images without sacrificing the speed. No matter the size or number of files, Uploadcare delivers them as quickly as possible thanks to the accelerated uploading technology and the net of distributed servers.

Photographers often need their content in different sizes. Uploadcare spares Aryeo’s users from pre-generating multiple files with additional photo editing software. Instead, the platform creates resized versions from a single file.

Aryeo had Uploadcare deployed in less than a day, and media management has been on autopilot ever since. The team simply embedded the JavaScript widget and added it into the current forms. Uploadcare took on all ongoing maintenance and support, allowing the company to focus on the core product instead.

Integrating Uploadcare turned out to be a win-win for Aryeo and their customers. The platform now seamlessly processes thousands of user files without putting an extra strain on the development team.

After embracing Uploadcare, Aryeo forgot about failed uploads. The uptime improved from 95% to 99.9%, and with tens of thousands of pieces of content uploaded daily, that small change made a huge difference.

Aryeo’s users can now upload multiple files without bothering to resize them first: all files are fetched in a snap regardless of their size. Should users need smaller images, they can resize them directly on the platform.

Uploadcare spared Aryeo from having to support file-handling infrastructure. The company has only seven full-time engineers, and ongoing maintenance would have required at least one or two of them.

With file handling off their minds, the team was able to focus entirely on experimenting with new features. Today they have major releases every other week and launch mini-features every day. At the moment, the company is also designing an IOS mobile app that is due in 2021.

In only two years of existence, Aryeo has gained the trust of tens of thousands of clients. Yet the company hasn’t invested a single dollar in paid advertisements. All of the new users heard about the platform through word of mouth, mostly on social media. This organic growth was possible largely thanks to regular updates and reliable functionality that enhanced the customer experience.

Uploadcare is an end-to-end cloud platform that provides a next-gen infrastructure for file handling. It can cover any part of the media pipeline or all of them at once: