Customer.io is a leading customer engagement platform that helps businesses automate messages across email, push notifications, SMS, and more. With a focus on delivering personalized customer experiences, Customer.io relies on efficient and reliable data infrastructure to support their operations.

Results

• +25% developer productivity through DinoAI assistance, easy navigation, and cross-platform lineage

• 20% cost savings in Snowflake spend through AI-powered warehouse optimization

• 24/7 pipeline reliability with 100% uptime for dbt™ jobs in the last 365 days

• Eliminated local setup issues by moving from VS Code to Paradime's web-based IDE

• Accelerated development cycles with streamlined model navigation and instant SQL preview

The Challenge

As one of dbt Cloud™'s earliest adopters, Customer.io's analytics team was familiar with the benefits of using dbt™ for data transformations. However, they encountered limitations with their previous setup that hindered productivity and scalability.

"The way we worked before Paradime was that everybody was developing locally, using VS Code and then running stuff in the terminal themselves," explains Will Clayton, Head of Analytics at Customer.io. "That's obviously not ideal for a whole host of reasons, including if your internet blips out, then your dbt run is going to stop. And it's difficult to monitor things that someone else kicked off."

The team needed a solution that would eliminate local development headaches, improve collaboration, and provide greater visibility into their data models while reducing infrastructure costs.

The Solution

After evaluating different options, Customer.io chose Paradime for its developer-first approach and integrated AI capabilities. The platform's web-based IDE, scheduling reliability, and cost optimization features addressed the team's key pain points while providing new capabilities to enhance productivity.

AI-Enhanced Developer Experience

Paradime's Code IDE delivered a robust development environment with a seamless terminal experience and powerful AI capabilities that transformed how Customer.io's data team works. This developer-first approach with embedded DinoAI support significantly accelerated their modeling process.

"The clicking on a model to jump to it or to open the compiled SQL for it is incredibly helpful," says Will. "When we were doing development locally, there was a lot of hunting through the target folder to find the file we wanted to look at. Being able to quickly navigate between models and see what's actually going to compile makes a tremendous difference."

The ability to view data samples and lineage directly in the UI has also been transformative. "It's helpful to see lineage into the BI tool so that when we're making changes we understand the potential impact and blast radius," Will notes. This cross-platform visibility has been particularly valuable when working with their Sigma analytics platform.

DinoAI helps the team troubleshoot and debug more efficiently. "Sometimes it's definitely helpful. The 'fix model' capabilities are particularly nice when trying to identify and resolve errors," explains Will. The team appreciates how DinoAI helps them resolve issues that would otherwise require manual debugging.

Seamless CI/CD and Orchestration

Customer.io leverages Paradime's Bolt for reliable job scheduling and orchestration. The team implemented CI/CD alongside their Paradime deployment, which has helped catch errors before they reach production.

"The orchestration side of things has been pretty straightforward and helpful," notes Will. "Having it all in one interface makes it better. When you're running something and it indicates a failure, the ability to see the compiled SQL behind that failure with a click versus hunting through your target repo is super helpful."

Transitioning from dbt Cloud™ to Paradime was remarkably smooth. "It was pretty painless. You guys had an import jobs feature, so the migration process was straightforward," Will shares.

Cost Reduction with Radar

Paradime's Radar has delivered significant Snowflake cost savings through AI-driven warehouse management. The platform automatically scales resources up and down based on actual usage patterns, optimizing costs without sacrificing performance.

"The biggest impact might be the agent turning off things faster than Snowflake would," explains Will. "It's been very impactful in managing Sigma Compute spend in Snowflake because it's scaling the warehouse down when nobody's using it, like when one person in Europe is doing work, and scaling it back up when the US teams or the Americas teams are online."

These intelligent optimizations have resulted in approximately 20% savings on Customer.io's daily Snowflake bill without any negative impact on performance or reliability.

The Impact

For Customer.io, Paradime has transformed both development speed and operational efficiency. The platform has eliminated the time spent troubleshooting local environment issues and significantly reduced the effort required to understand and navigate complex data models.

"Reflecting back on when we were doing local setups, we'd sometimes run into issues where something weird is happening in a config on your local machine and none of us are necessarily super savvy terminal or Linux users to figure out what's wrong," Will explains. "The reliability of Paradime's setup process eliminates those headaches, and there's not any dependency on particular machine configurations."

This has been particularly valuable when onboarding new team members. Will recalls the challenges they faced previously: "We had problems when we onboarded somebody who had the new Apple chips in their Mac. There were extra steps for M1 or M2 Macs that weren't needed on the x86 machines before. It was a pain to figure out how to get unblocked and get this person to actually be able to run dbt."

With Paradime, these configuration challenges disappeared, allowing the team to focus on delivering business value rather than managing infrastructure.

What's Next

Customer.io continues to refine its data operations using Paradime's platform. The team is exploring deeper usage of Radar's team performance analytics and model optimization features to further enhance their data infrastructure.

As they scale, Customer.io values Paradime's ability to deliver both development speed and cost efficiency, creating a data platform that grows with their needs. The AI-enhanced developer experience and exceptional support continue to be key factors in Customer.io's success with Paradime.