- Industry
- B2B SaaS, AI sales intelligence
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- Berlin, Germany
- Website
- platoapp.ai
- To ship the full upload feature, with one developer
- <1 week
- Maintenance since launch, no infrastructure to run
- Zero
There are certain solved problems in the world, and I don’t want to re-solve a problem that’s already solved. Uploadcare gives us something that’s table stakes, in one package that works, at a reasonable price.
Oliver BirchCo-founder and CTO
Executive summary
Plato is the AI sales intelligence software for B2B wholesale distributors. Sales teams across the DACH region use it to turn ERP data into proactive recommendations and to automate quoting, order handling and everyday sales work.
As Plato rounded out its product to stand alongside established sales tools, file uploads became something its users expected. Rather than build and maintain that pipeline in-house, the team added Uploadcare to handle the uploader experience, processing and metadata. One developer shipped the full feature in under a week, and the team has not had to touch it since.
The challenge: a table-stakes feature the team didn’t want to own
Plato gives wholesale sales reps CRM-style features like tasks, events and notes, and those workflows kept running into files. A rep creating a task often needs to attach a purchase order or a PDF tied to a deal. Others want to photograph handwritten notes from a customer visit, straight from a phone or iPad.
For a long time none of that was possible inside the product. Everything was text, and documents moved through email and other side channels instead. File uploads sat in the backlog: not the reason anyone buys Plato, but the kind of capability that, missing alongside a few others, quietly holds back adoption and weakens the product when it is measured against full-suite sales tools.
The team knew building it themselves was possible, and knew it was a trap. A production upload flow is not a single widget. It means handling every file type, capturing photos on mobile, pulling metadata off each file, and standing up storage and processing services to run behind all of it, for a feature that is not core to what Plato does.
If we built it ourselves, we’d have to stand up services and infrastructure to manage it. It’s something we could have done, but it’s really not core to what we do. It’s a side quest we just had to get right.
The solution
Plato added Uploadcare to handle uploads, processing and metadata behind its task, event and note features. Oliver had used Uploadcare before, so the team knew what they were getting: a customizable uploader that covers the cases they cared about, with file metadata available the moment a file lands.
Instead of building storage and processing services and wiring them into their Terraform-managed infrastructure, the team kept the entire upload problem inside their application code. Files land in Plato’s own storage bucket, and Uploadcare handles the uploader and the processing around it.
By using Uploadcare, handling uploads stays entirely within our TypeScript codebase. It never became something we had to build and run in our own infrastructure.
How Uploadcare helped
- A customizable uploader that covers every source: One uploader handles device files, cloud storage and camera capture, so a rep on a phone or iPad can photograph notes or a document with no extra work from Plato’s team.
- Metadata out of the box: File type and other metadata come back the moment a file uploads, work the team would otherwise have had to build and maintain itself.
- No new infrastructure to run: Uploads stay inside Plato’s application code instead of becoming another set of services to provision, secure and maintain.
- Priced for their volume: The per-customer cost was low enough to make buying the obvious choice over building in-house.
The results: shipped fast, then out of mind
- Live in under a week: One developer built the entire feature, uploader included, in less than a week.
- Zero maintenance since: Once it shipped, the team hasn’t had to think about it or touch it. No pipeline to babysit and no infrastructure to keep running.
- Adoption, not just a feature: With uploads in the product, document workflows that used to happen over email now stay inside Plato, so reps can work end to end in one place.