PubNub Mothership Case Study

CASE STUDY
Mothership Modernizes Freight

Shipping with Real-Time Data
“PubNub is the driving force

in our mobile app. If we turned
off PubNub right now, carriers
would not be able to use our app
to service shipments on a daily
basis.”
Jacob Richards
Staff Software Engineer
Mothership
Mothership CASE STUDY
Meet Mothership
Mothership is modernizing the freight industry

with its all-in-one shipping platform. Their
mission is to ensure that freight gets to the
right carriers at the right times by connecting
shipments to the nearest trucks and sending
them on the fastest route possible.
Operating reliably to deliver
shipment updates
Their platform gives customers the ability
to track freight on a map in real time, which
Mothership uses PubNub for real-time shipment
provides full visibility into their shipment
status updates in their mobile app. “PubNub is the
from the time it is picked up to the time it is
driving force in our mobile app. If we turned off
delivered. Additionally, they offer carriers
PubNub right now, carriers would not be able to
the flexibility to choose their own schedule,
use our app to service shipments on a daily basis,”
allowing them to maximize efficiency and
said Jacob Richards, Staff Software Engineer at
earn within the same day of delivery.
Mothership.
Because their platform is focused on speed

With Mothership, carriers are able to find what
and transparency throughout the delivery
shipment offers are available to them and accept
process, it’s essential that Mothership is
an offer directly in the app. From there, carriers
able to deliver real-time updates to their
will receive the list of shipments and be notified
customers. However, due to usage spikes,
about what order they need to be delivered in
Mothership found themselves needing a
through shipment updates via PubNub—keeping
solution that could operate reliably and
all devices and relevant parties in the loop. For
at scale to push out real-time data to their
instance, their platform receives a shipment order
client-side applications. So when it came time
and then Mothership creates those orders in their
to rebuild their mobile app, they turned to
system, assigns them, connects the freight to the
PubNub.
nearest carrier, and sends it on the fastest route.
Mothership CASE STUDY
“For our mobile app, PubNub powers implementation process and the ability to easily
everything,” said Richards. “Being able to integrate PubNub into their existing tech stack
hook these real-time data changes into any made the choice of partnering with PubNub clear.
of our services and push that data out on our
client-side application is essential. “PubNub Providing real-time visibility into
also supports our backend event-driven freight delivery
architecture, as we can subscribe to changes
in relevant domains, then push those changes Since using PubNub, Mothership has been able
out to the clients via PubNub.” to push out real-time data to assets and scale
their platform with ease. Mothership also has
Quickly iterating on their mobile access to Datadog dashboards, which allows
app them to monitor PubNub behavior and to be
alerted if any issues arise. This provides them
Before partnering with PubNub, Mothership with real-time visibility, allowing their team to
relied very heavily on other solutions in order actively find and solve problems, like ensuring
to handle these real-time data changes, such that freight gets picked up and delivered on
as direct database change subscriptions, time.
which result in a tight coupling between client-
side applications and backend data schemas. Looking to the future as Mothership’s usage
But as they grew from 10 engineers to 30 continues to grow, Richards and his team are
engineers—supporting hundreds of shipments confident that PubNub will be able to reliably
booked per second—they wanted to be able power their real-time needs. “With PubNub,
to focus their development efforts on iterating we have the ability to do whatever fetching
their mobile app more quickly and supporting or data materialization that we need to do on
their continued growth. the backend, and push exactly what we need
into PubNub,” said Richards. “In the future, I’m
“Just looking at all the technology out there, excited to explore the other functionality that
PubNub really fit the bill just because it was PubNub offers.”
plug-and-play,” said Richards. After surveying
different solutions, Richards and his team If you would like to learn how PubNub can help
built out a proof of concept mobile app and you power your platform with reliable, real-time
corresponding backend services with PubNub. features—get in touch with our team of experts.
Once doing so, the team found that the simple

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CASE STUDY

Mothership Modernizes Freight

“PubNub is the driving force

Mothership is modernizing the freight industry

Because their platform is focused on speed

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