Instacard have released a public dataset[1] on their orders, so it should be even easier to verify this claim. From what I could find in some analysis[2] of this dataset around 100k orders per day and not per minute seems accurate.
I assume they are referring to how many database requests they have due to customers orders or a similar metric and just worded it poorly.
I worked at a company that had billions of views per year on a single big Postgres instance. Extremely read heavy with many queries needed for a page load. You can cache a lot of things.
That doesn't necessarily mean _new_ orders per minute. Their app or website could poll for updates every 15 seconds
Could just be looking at the "orders" endpoint in their app which might also include incremental updates as shoppers get items from the store. It's a fairly ambiguous statement
Is that still a lot? Feels like a single 64-core, 256GB RDS instance with some caching should handle that fine. RDS has instances up to 192-core and 768GB.
100k(s) orders per minute is several orders of magnitude more than realistic. Amazon does 20k orders per minute.
Instacart doesn't need "100,000s of grocery delivery orders per minute".
There must be some 0s added for the sake of the story.
According their 2026 Q1 filing they do about 90 million orders per quarter which is about 12 orders per second, 720 orders per minute.
It might make 100k row level changes per minute, but that’s a different metric.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579091/000157909126...
Instacard have released a public dataset[1] on their orders, so it should be even easier to verify this claim. From what I could find in some analysis[2] of this dataset around 100k orders per day and not per minute seems accurate.
I assume they are referring to how many database requests they have due to customers orders or a similar metric and just worded it poorly.
[1] https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/psparks/instacart-market-bas... [2] https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/284199_5c498037...
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it could be peak orders per second
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And just like that you’ve done more due diligence than the VCs who just threw money at this.
Amazon does 20k peak, or 20k average? Website visitor peaks could easily be two orders of magnitude higher traffic than average for a few minutes.
I worked at a company that had billions of views per year on a single big Postgres instance. Extremely read heavy with many queries needed for a page load. You can cache a lot of things.
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That doesn't necessarily mean _new_ orders per minute. Their app or website could poll for updates every 15 seconds
Could just be looking at the "orders" endpoint in their app which might also include incremental updates as shoppers get items from the store. It's a fairly ambiguous statement
It's orders, not queries. Who knows how many requests that actually takes.
One assumes they mean 100,000s (plural) concurrent users actively building carts
Is that still a lot? Feels like a single 64-core, 256GB RDS instance with some caching should handle that fine. RDS has instances up to 192-core and 768GB.
Keep in mind they’re doing real-time logistics and messaging, as well as type-ahead search and managing ads and promotions
Average throughput is one thing, tail latency, quite another.