From Hours Behind to Real-Time: How TAGGRS Cut Data Latency from One Hour to Seconds

About TAGGRS

TAGGRS is a product-driven company focused on server-side tracking and real-time analytics. They provide marketers with a first-party tracking infrastructure that processes hundreds of millions of events per day, delivering accurate, privacy-safe data they can trust to show real campaign impact.

But even the best analytics platform is only as good as its speed.

Problem: The Broken Promise of Real-Time Analytics

“Our users would trigger events on their websites and wait almost an hour before seeing them on the dashboard,” said Stefan de Vries, senior software developer at TAGGRS. “It made testing and monitoring incredibly frustrating.”

Originally, TAGGRS relied on a data flow that started with Nginx logs, then queried through Trino before landing in PostgreSQL.

But Trino became a bottleneck, taking 16–17 minutes to process and move data through the pipeline, leaving dashboards an hour behind reality.

“Trino isn’t designed for analytics,” Stefan explained. “It’s a tool for complex multi-bucket queries. Using it for our use case was like using a screwdriver to hammer a nail.”

Why ClickHouse® and Altinity

TAGGRS needed a purpose-built analytics database. A freelance DevOps consultant recommended ClickHouse. While TAGGRS relied on a third party for setting up robust infrastructure, maintaining ClickHouse clusters in-house wasn’t in their wheelhouse.

That’s when Stefan found Altinity, the experts behind ClickHouse deployments for enterprise companies. “We’re using PostHog for dashboarding, and I noticed PostHog is using Altinity for their setup. I’m a big fan of PostHog. Seeing that PostHog trusted Altinity made it clear this was the route we wanted to go.”

Stefan elaborated on why a managed solution made sense: “Setting up ClickHouse clusters and maintaining infrastructure wasn’t our sweet spot. I know how to build front ends and ship features, not wrangle servers all afternoon. The maintenance cost doesn’t weigh up to the out-of-the-box solutions from Altinity.”

From the very first call, the Altinity team’s approach stood out. They weren’t pushing a product — they were helping TAGGRS design the right setup. Through Altinity.Cloud’s Bring Your Own Cloud option, TAGGRS could deploy ClickHouse on their existing Google Cloud infrastructure, use their own credits, maintain full control of their data, and avoid vendor lock-in.

“From the first call, it was clear these were ClickHouse specialists. They weren’t trying to sell us something; they were helping us figure out the right setup,” Stefan said.

From Documentation to Production

Even without prior experience in distributed databases or Terraform, Stefan had ClickHouse running as a POC in TAGGRS’ Google Cloud account within an hour using Altinity’s documentation.

“I have a little DevOps experience; however, I don’t have any experience with these clusters or Terraform whatsoever,” he said. “But even then, I had everything up and running within an hour. The steps were very straightforward.”

Documentation got them started. Altinity’s team made them effective.

Altinity’s engineers went beyond the documentation, reviewing TAGGRS’s Parquet files to optimize schema design, filtering out personal data to meet European data privacy requirements, and helping design horizontal and vertical scaling. Altinity also guided key decisions on node types to handle peak loads and how data would be distributed.

Throughout implementation, the Altinity team remained available and responsive even in the middle of an AWS outage. Stefan remarked that Altinity still provided the support TAGGRS needed.

“We felt really involved and supported. The service has been above and beyond.”

The Result: Faster Performance, Simpler Architecture, Smaller Footprint 

When TAGGRS switched to ClickHouse, the improvement was immediate:

• 99.9% reduction in latency (from 1 hour to seconds)
• Reduced costs due to compression efficiency
• Easy scaling for data growth

“Data is available in the dashboard within seconds. The difference is night and day. Now, data appears instantly. That’s a fundamentally better experience for our customers,” Stefan stated.

Beyond the immediate latency gains, ClickHouse enables TAGGRS to:

• Reduce pipeline complexity: “We still use Kafka, but our hosting costs and operational complexity have reduced compared to our previous setup.”
• Lower infrastructure costs through native compression: “With a 90-day data retention requirement, our ClickHouse setup is surprisingly small, which is great for hosting costs.”
• Scale 10x without hitting limits: “If we grow ten times as big with ten times as many requests, ClickHouse isn’t the limitation,” Stefan said. “We have other parts in our system that will limit us first. It’s just very nice how you can scale horizontally and vertically.”

Building Product, Not Infrastructure

For TAGGRS, choosing Altinity.Cloud BYOC was as much about partnership as it was about technology. They valued control and transparency without vendor lock-in, and a team that was genuinely invested in their success. 

“Altinity felt like a partner, not a vendor,” Stefan said. “They wanted us to succeed, not just sign a deal.” That collaboration helped the small team move fast. While a peer company spent two years migrating to ClickHouse, TAGGRS did it in a week and immediately returned to building their product.

“If you want real-time analytics and a team that has your back, go with Altinity,” Stefan stated. “You’ll spend more time building your product and less time maintaining your infrastructure.”