How Gearfire Cut IT Costs 67% with Elastic Cloud Serverless
Gearfire provides ecommerce, point-of-sale, and merchant services for firearms retailers across the United States. After rebuilding its technology stack around serverless architecture and infrastructure-as-code, the company migrated to Elastic Cloud Serverless for full-text product search, cutting IT costs by 67% in the first month while gaining resilience against bot farm attacks. With compute and storage now scaling independently, Gearfire can activate new retail customers immediately and run large-scale reindexing without disrupting live ecommerce queries.
Impact
67%
IT cost reduction in first month
None
Bot attack cost impact
Immediate
New customer activation speed
Challenge
Gearfire’s shared infrastructure architecture meant that enabling new distributors or scaling for bot attacks forced expensive, coupled resource increases across memory, compute, and storage — making cost control and growth fundamentally at odds without a dedicated DevOps team to manage the overhead.
Solution
Gearfire migrated to Elastic Cloud Serverless, replacing its coupled infrastructure with a fully managed, decoupled compute-and-storage model that scales indexing and search independently, eliminating bot-driven cost spikes and enabling new customer onboarding without provisioning delays.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“When we first began building, the choice was between Elastic and OpenSearch. But it was an easy decision for us to go with Elastic for its features, support, and overall flexibility.”
“When Elastic Cloud Serverless first became available, it was something we were very excited about. It’s fully managed, so we can get projects started quickly without worrying about operations or upgrades.”
“The overall cost savings have been significant. In the first month alone, Gearfire saved around 67%.”
“The real advantage is knowing that costs are under control. That gives us the freedom to innovate, whether it’s modifying data structures or pushing new information into the system, to make business even smoother for our customers.”
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Full Story
Gearfire operates as the technology infrastructure layer for US firearms retailers, handling product search, point-of-sale, and merchant services at scale. For a company whose business model hinges on profitably onboarding each new retail client, cost predictability is not a preference — it is the operating constraint that determines whether growth is sustainable.
As the customer base grew, Gearfire’s ingestion pipeline became a bottleneck. Enabling a new distributor meant processing listings across every retail client simultaneously, slowing the entire system under load. Bot farm attacks compounded the problem: handling spikes required scaling CPU, but that also triggered unnecessary memory and storage costs. Without a dedicated DevOps team, managing infrastructure had become a ceiling on growth.
Gearfire rebuilt its technology stack entirely around serverless architecture and infrastructure-as-code. For product search, it adopted Elastic Cloud Serverless, which runs a decoupled compute and storage model. This lets the team scale indexing and search workloads independently — heavy ingestion jobs no longer compete with live ecommerce queries, and the fully managed service eliminates operational overhead for a team without dedicated DevOps resources.
In the first month after migration, Gearfire cut costs by 67%. Bot farm attacks that previously caused billing spikes now go unnoticed. “Costs don’t spike, which was a welcome outcome,” said CTO Matt Carden. The company can now activate new retail customers immediately after onboarding, compressing what was previously a complex provisioning process into near-instant enablement.
Gearfire is already exploring ways to extend Elasticsearch into improved checkout experiences and expanded data-driven capabilities across its retail network. With infrastructure costs now predictable and scalable, the engineering team can redirect effort toward product features rather than system maintenance. The platform’s roadmap toward generative AI use cases is informing how Gearfire is building for its next phase of growth.
