# 360 billion tokens, 3 million customers, 6 engineers

DevFeed: [360 billion tokens, 3 million customers, 6 engineers](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/360-billion-tokens-3-million-customers-6-engineers-717.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://vercel.com/blog/360-billion-tokens-3-million-customers-6-engineers>)

Author: Eric Dodds

Published: 2026-03-18T04:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Vercel News](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/vercel-news.md>)

Topics: [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [Software as a service](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/saas.md>), [hosting](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hosting.md>), [SSL](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ssl.md>), [Security](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/security.md>), [DDoS](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ddos.md>), [Architecture & Design](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/architecture-design.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/observability.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ddos](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ddos.md>), [hosting](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hosting.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/observability.md>), [saas](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/saas.md>), [security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security.md>), [self-hosting](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/self-hosting.md>), [ssl](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ssl.md>), [vercel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/vercel.md>)

## AI overview

This developer case study describes Durable, an AI business builder serving about 1.1 billion tokens per day and 3 million customers with a six-engineer team. It explains how Durable consolidated its multi-tenant, multi-product infrastructure on Vercel to ship production agents quickly and reduce infrastructure costs compared with self-hosting.

## Source excerpt

Impact at a glance Durable ships new production agents to customers in a single day AI features and agents serve ~1.1B tokens per day (360B per year) 10x leverage for every engineer, product manager, and designer 3-4x lower infra cost compared to self hosting Durable began with a simple goal: make owning a business easier than having a job. 60% of U.S. adults say they want to be their own boss, but only about 4% actually do it. Durable's bet is that the blocker isn't ambition. It's friction. "Small businesses are death by a thousand tools, logins, workflows, and designs," explained James Clift, founder of Durable. "If you remove those barriers, business owners can focus on their customers." Today, Durable is an AI business builder that helps entrepreneurs launch in minutes, then optimize with agents that handle things like SEO, content, and operations. The gap between idea and ownership has never been smaller. It feels like one seamless experience to their customers, but under the hood it's a multi-tenant, multi-product platform that has to run millions of individual businesses safely, reliably, and cost-effectively. As they scaled, manually operating multiple services just to self-host was enough work to be a second product. With a small team, Durable chose rapid consolidation over incremental improvement: one codebase, one infrastructure platform. Infra is hard; multi-tenant infra is harder Durable isn't serving one app. They are managing millions of customer sites, CRMs, and agents, each with different traffic patterns and different operational needs. One customer site might get 100x the traffic of another, and power laws show up quickly. When spikes happen, a small portion of Durable customers can consume a disproportionate share of compute, which made cost isolation, attribution, and pricing strategy significant engineering problems. Khan called out a few of the most acute pain-points from self-hosting: Custom domains and SSL at SaaS scale, including paying tho