# How Acoustic Saved $178K and Eliminated 30-Minute Builds with WunderGraph Cosmo

## $178K

Cost avoided by eliminating custom gateway features and Rust plugin development

## 10k+

Lines of GraphQL replaced with an interactive visual explorer

## Migration via simple DNS update

Cosmo rollout followed a month of pre-production testing before switching DNS

Industry

Marketing Technology

Company Size

600+

## Company Overview

Acoustic is a marketing and customer engagement platform used by more than 3,500 global brands, including Fortune 500 companies. Their GraphQL gateway powers customer journeys across email, mobile, SMS, and social. As demand grew, the gateway became a core dependency, one that needed to move fast, stay reliable, and support multiple client tiers without adding operational overhead.

## The Challenge

### A Gateway Too Expensive to Evolve

Acoustic’s GraphQL gateway had become too slow and costly to maintain:

- #### 30-minute router builds on the Rust gateway
- #### Every subgraph update triggered a full supergraph rebuild
- #### Schema changes required digging through 10,000+ lines of GraphQL
- #### No schema registry or UI to visualize changes
- #### Rollbacks required CI support and often took hours
- #### Rust plugin development slowed engineers and limited who could contribute

### Each time a new plugin had to be written, we were losing two weeks of an engineer’s time.

Karol Krogulec, Senior Engineering Manager

## The Solution

### Cleaner, More Observable Federation with Cosmo

An engineer suggested trying WunderGraph Cosmo, so the team ran it in pre-production for a month using the same schema and subgraphs as their existing system. The setup was clean, and Cosmo Studio gave them their first real way to inspect and validate schema changes visually.

### The migration was just updating the DNS record

Kira Shatskyi, Senior Engineer

### See Cosmo in action

[Learn more about Cosmo](/content/site-root.html)

## The Results

### Lower Complexity, Faster Workflows, Better Reliability

### Sometimes we forget it exists because it just works

Kira Shatskyi, Senior Engineer

Cosmo simplified Acoustic’s stack and improved reliability immediately:

- #### No more Rust plugins, auth Lambdas, or Jenkins rollback pipelines
- #### Fast Go-based router replaced slow 30-minute Rust builds
- #### No more digging through 10k+ lines of schema in GitHub thanks to the visual schema explorer
- #### Subgraphs managed cleanly through the schema registry
- #### Public, private, and client-specific APIs are isolated on dedicated routers
- #### Safe, fast rollbacks without CI intervention
- #### @include and @exclude support made routing patterns cleaner
- #### The gateway became invisible infrastructure — stable, reliable, and low-maintenance

### It was brittle—failures could cost us a full day just to reconcile. With Cosmo, all of that went away.

Stefan Hepper, Distinguished Architect

## The Conclusion

### A Modern GraphQL Platform Built for Growth

Acoustic replaced an expensive, hard-to-evolve GraphQL gateway with a platform built for clarity, speed, and safety. Cosmo improved developer experience, reduced operational risk, and saved an estimated $178K in engineering effort—before counting long-term maintenance. For Acoustic, the payoff was simple: a faster platform, a cleaner architecture, and a federated graph they no longer have to worry about.

## Frequently Asked Question

### How much did Acoustic save by moving to Cosmo?

Acoustic saved nearly $178,000 in engineering effort by replacing Rust plugins and brittle rollbacks with Cosmo’s schema-aware router and visual tooling.

### What challenges did Acoustic face with their old GraphQL gateway?

Their Rust-based router took up to 30 minutes to build, every subgraph change triggered a full supergraph rebuild, schema conflicts caused deployment issues, and rollbacks required CI-heavy coordination.

### How easy was it to migrate from the Rust router to Cosmo?

According to Acoustic, “The migration was just updating the DNS record from the old router to the Cosmo Router.”

### What new capabilities did Cosmo provide Acoustic?

Cosmo added a visual schema explorer, schema registry, built-in traffic controls, and taggable, isolated endpoints that separated public/private APIs and enabled customer-specific interfaces.

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