Today’s digital-first health and wellness companies must deliver fast, reliable, and personalized user experiences that work anytime, anywhere. At the same time, they must manage increasing user traffic, real-time data processing, and infrastructure costs across a mix of online and offline environments. For ButfitSeoul, a rising fitness technology company based in South Korea, meeting these demands meant rethinking its platform architecture from the ground up.
Founded in 2018, ButfitSeoul combines physical fitness services like its BUTFITGROUND premium gym and TEAMBUTFIT group workouts with a mobile-first digital experience that rewards users for staying active. Members connect their exercise equipment to the Butfit app, track real-time performance data, and earn redeemable points, turning every workout into a gamified, engaging experience.
Modernizing architecture to support growth, real-time data, and offline users
As ButfitSeoul’s user base and service footprint expanded rapidly after the COVID-19 pandemic, its legacy RDBMS architecture could no longer keep up. The platform struggled to support peak-time traffic and low-latency data synchronization across devices. Scaling required complex backend management and costly infrastructure. In particular, delivering a responsive experience with offline functionality became critical for gyms and users in variable connectivity environments.
To solve these challenges, ButfitSeoul adopted Couchbase as the core data platform for its mobile app and backend services. Couchbase was deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide flexibility, scalability, and cloud-native reliability. The company also implemented Couchbase Mobile and Sync Gateway to enable real-time synchronization and local caching directly on users’ devices.
Faster app experiences and 70% fewer API calls with Couchbase
By transitioning to Couchbase, ButfitSeoul was able to completely modernize its architecture and eliminate API bottlenecks, enable offline-first capabilities, and dramatically improve performance. Real-time data, such as speed and distance on treadmills or rowers, now syncs automatically between devices and the cloud with minimal backend load.
Additionally, Couchbase’s distributed memory-first architecture gives ButfitSeoul the ability to handle heavy traffic during peak hours while keeping costs in check.
Since deployment, ButfitSeoul has:
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- Reduced API calls from ~37 to 10 per session
- Cut initial app load time from 3 seconds to under 1 second
- Improved UI responsiveness and offline reliability
- Lowered operational costs and simplified DevOps processes
ButfitSeoul has built a modern, scalable platform with Couchbase to support its real-time fitness services and has helped users stay active, engaged, and connected every step of the way.
If you’re interested in learning why over 30% of the Fortune 100 trust Couchbase to power their applications, be sure to start using Couchbase Capella for free today. And for more examples of what our customers are doing with Couchbase, check out our customer case study page.
