BFCM 2025: What teams built when infrastructure stopped being the problem

Code freezes in August. All-hands alerts at 3 AM. That's what Black Friday used to look like for e-commerce teams.

This year, something different happened. Teams built better experiences because they stopped fighting infrastructure.

The opportunity cost of a misaligned stack

Here's what you lose when your content system demands constant attention:

Time - Weeks of prep work, code freezes, manual testing
Focus - Engineering solving infrastructure problems instead of business problems
Velocity - Features delayed because the system can't handle changes safely
Confidence - Every deployment feels risky because something always breaks under load

Tecovas spent the months before BFCM building automation workflows and custom tools. When Black Friday hit, they got to watch their work hold up under real pressure: 106% traffic increase, sessions regularly hitting 50,000 per hour (200% above previous records), and 50-70% higher sales throughout Friday.

They were monitoring, like every team does. But they weren't fixing.

Building live experiences instead of maintaining broken ones

Here's something we didn't expect: Stripe used Sanity to power their BFCM data visualization.

David Demaree built the backend for Stripe City, a very cool concept with video-game-like visuals showing live transaction data across 11 tiny screens. Real payments flowing through a miniature digital metropolis throughout the weekend. The setup included SvelteKit apps displaying real-time metrics and Sanity as the coordination layer.

David's approach came directly from our Everything NYC event in September, where he watched Bjørn Staal's live, data-driven installation use Sanity as a message bus for a physical experience. "This more than anything inspired my approach to these billboards and gave me confidence that it would work," David explained. That creative spark from our NYC event translated perfectly to Stripe's BFCM visualization needs.

Why Sanity for a Stripe project? In David's words:

"I know BFCM weekend is huge for many of Sanity's clients, and that the team thinks deeply about how to ensure not just uptime but exceptional performance under load."

He evaluated Supabase and custom WebSocket implementations, but kept coming back to Content Lake because the live data pipeline "just worked." He ran it for two weeks before the event and never had to think about the backend again.

That's the goal. Build once, stop thinking about it.

What made that possible? Infrastructure that didn't need babysitting.

When boring becomes a competitive advantage

While Tecovas was building and Stripe was creating, here's what was happening behind the scenes.

The numbers our SRE team didn't panic about:

• 2.4M requests per minute at peak
• 0.00018% error rate on Black Friday
• 0.0087% across full BFCM period
• Zero internal incidents

But here's the interesting part: our total Black Friday API volume actually decreased year-over-year (801M in 2025 vs ~1B in 2024). Customer traffic hit all-time highs, but several large e-commerce brands made optimizations which were substantial enough to swing the aggregate numbers.

When infrastructure handles the hard parts, teams optimize smarter instead of just handling more load.

What your team could ship next year

If your BFCM looked like this:

• Code freeze starting in August
• Preview environments breaking
• Content updates taking hours when inventory changed
• Engineers scrambling instead of optimizing

Consider what Tecovas did instead:

• Built an experimental Product Information Tool with the App SDK
• Automated colorway management with Sanity Functions
• Optimized their conversion funnel
• Scaled traffic 106% without infrastructure concerns

The difference isn't luck. It's infrastructure that doesn't demand attention when it matters most.

Your team deserves to spend Black Friday shipping features, not fighting fires.

Book a demo to see how Sanity handles high-traffic events, or explore how Functions and the App SDK enable teams to build custom automation and tools.