How an image-heavy marketplace scaled to 4M+ images and 50TB monthly traffic

marko is Switzerland’s community-driven secondhand marketplace, built for Gen Z and millennial consumers who care about sustainability, affordability, and style. Because every listing depends on photos, image uploads and delivery sit at the center of both seller activation and buyer conversion.

As a lean startup preparing for launch, marko initially explored building its own image pipeline. That effort quickly proved too complex for the timeline. Uploadcare gave the team a reliable media layer for uploads, transformations, delivery, and cleanup, helping them launch on time, keep the product fast, and support AI-assisted listing flows from day one.

marko is a community-driven secondhand marketplace where users buy and sell items through image-based listings. The product depends on user-generated images. Sellers need to upload photos quickly, buyers expect crisp listings that load instantly, and those same images also power AI-assisted listing flows that prefill titles, categories, brands, colors, and pricing suggestions. That makes media infrastructure a core part of the product rather than a background service. With a fixed launch window approaching and major dependencies still in progress, there was a clear need for reliable image handling that wouldn’t slow development.

Initially the team tried building its own CDN image pipeline, but the scope expanded quickly. Uploading files was only the beginning. They also needed multiple output sizes, retina-friendly rendering, on-the-fly transformations, deletion logic for abandoned listings, and reliable delivery at scale. For a small engineering team, continuing down that path would have delayed launch by roughly another month and pulled resources away from product-critical work.

marko adopted Uploadcare early as the foundation of its media pipeline. Rather than combining separate tools for storage, CDN delivery, transformations, and cleanup, the team moved those components into one infrastructure layer that could scale with the marketplace.

With marketing plans, launch dependencies, and a tight engineering schedule already in motion, marko needed a solution it could implement quickly instead of extending the roadmap for a non-core system. By choosing Uploadcare before launch, they reduced the scope the team had to carry internally and made it possible to stay on track for go-live.

Instead of having a complex set of media requirements, Uploadcare gave marko a stable system that could be reused across the product.

With media infrastructure handled by Uploadcare, marko could focus on launching and scaling the marketplace instead of maintaining image systems.