Comment by tomtomtom777
6 hours ago
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...
This data set was released years before the Covid hypergrowth phase which they are referring to.
1 reply →
it could be peak orders per second
I'd wager on this.
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.
Scaling (asynchronous) reads is much easier than scaling writes.
Yes, but that's not a shopping cart, or a checkout workflow, nor a web store with heavy analytics.
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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