CREX Cut Costs 80% While Scaling App Engagement

Parth is the force behind multiple cricket-focussed platforms, but its flagship app CREX — Just Cricket is in a league of its own. Since its launch in 2017, the CREX app has been downloaded more than 100 million times. With over 6 million daily users and more than 10 million active users on match days, CREX has grown into a go-to destination for live updates, commentary, and increasingly, video content. That explosive growth brought infrastructure challenges. As video consumption soared and traffic spiked during matches, Parth needed to rethink how it delivered, secured, and scaled its content. It found the solutions it needed with trusted partner Akamai.

“For our live blogging broadcast use case, we initially relied on Google Cloud Firestore and its client-side SDK to establish real-time socket connections from clients. However, this approach became costly and inefficient at scale,” said Rishav Saxena, CREX’s CTO. To address this, CREX migrated to Akamai CDN, where it introduced API polling instead of socket-based connections. This shift reduced the dependency on Firestore sockets and helped handle traffic more efficiently.

With Ion in place, CREX’s match-day surges — sometimes exceeding 100,000 requests per second — were absorbed effortlessly at the edge, reducing origin traffic by 70% to 80%. This also helped achieve about 80% cost reduction for this particular feature, and that was just the beginning.

In the midst of the Ion PoC, Parth’s OneCricket platform came under fire. With no WAF deployed, bots and malformed requests hammered OneCricket’s servers and dragged daily page views from 300,000 down to 50,000, tanking SEO rankings. “Our infrastructure was exposed. There was no rate limiting or automated threat response,” said Saxena.

Parth quickly implemented Akamai App & API Protector. The impact was immediate. With custom rules, real-time monitoring, and proactive defences, App & API Protector helped Parth’s security posture level up. “It blocked malicious requests at the edge, took pressure off our servers, and kept us online. It’s now our only public gateway,” Saxena said.

Until 2023, Parth didn’t host its own video content. Its CREX app relied on embedded media content, shorts, and infographics. Still, CREX users were deeply engaged, spending an average of 25 minutes per session. That level of stickiness made the team wonder: What if it could bring video delivery in-house and make the experience even more immersive?

Parth had previously experimented with Google’s adaptive streaming and transcoding capabilities. But as it considered expanding to live streaming and scaling up content delivery, it wanted to explore options that might better support its growing ambitions.

Given its strong experience using Ion and App & API Protector, Parth naturally considered Akamai for video delivery. So, it ran a head-to-head pilot between Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery and Cloudflare’s other media CDNs to make an informed decision.

The results confirmed it. “Akamai helped us scale video in a way that matched our user expectations: fast, smooth, and reliable playback even on mobile networks. It reduced video start-up times and improved the overall viewing experience for our users,” said Saxena.

The result of that better overall viewing experience? A 40% increase in session time, from 25 minutes to 35 minutes. And fans now receive video push alerts for breaking news and highlights, boosting engagement even further.

Parth also faced a cost bottleneck in the live blogging module with Google Firestore. Firestore’s real-time update capabilities were great … until 500,000 read requests per second pushed usage (and bills) through the roof. Google charges based on reads and connections, making the model unsustainable at scale.

Working with Akamai’s Professional Services team, Parth came up with a two-tiered solution: use Google Cloud Run for origin compute, and Redis for server-side caching, while calling upon Akamai Ion as a near-client caching layer.

By caching high-demand APIs at the edge for just two seconds, Parth kept latency low while offloading traffic from Firestore. “This setup cut our origin queries by 70%–80% and reduced costs by 80%,” said Saxena. “We no longer limit features based on cost. We’ve unlocked freedom for our developers and users.”

Today, Akamai powers nearly every part of Parth’s digital infrastructure:

• Ion handles massive traffic spikes while ensuring rapid content delivery.
• App & API Protector guards against bot attacks, malformed traffic, and API abuse.
• Adaptive Media Delivery powers Parth’s growing library of short-form and long-form video.
• Edge caching of APIs ensures fast, cost-efficient delivery of real-time match updates.

And the impact is clear, with 80% of origin traffic offloaded, 80% lower costs in content delivery, and session time up by 40%. Based on those results, Parth is confidently building for the future by planning to deliver live video content during matches. “We expect to scale to petabytes of video egress. With Akamai, we know we can keep costs in check without compromising performance or uptime,” said Saxena.

Operating a platform that serves more than 100 million cricket fans is no small feat. “Speed and accuracy are our main value prop. We serve millions of concurrent users during a single match,” said Saxena. “Akamai’s edge network ensures we stay resilient when it matters most.”

From database optimization and secure infrastructure to fast video delivery, Akamai provides more than solutions — it provides a solid foundation for innovation and growth. “Whether it’s API traffic or high-quality media, we need speed, security, and scale. Akamai delivers all three,” concluded Saxena.