It is hard to think of something being talked about more in tech at the moment than AI. With the industry rapidly growing, time-to-delivery is crucial. That is why the state-of-the-art AI-powered research engine Silatus turned to Transloadit and Uppy when it needed a file-uploading solution.

A white background with the Silatus logo in front.

Silatus started in 2022 with a clear mission: to make research feel like magic. Christopher Pratt created the best-value research engine available. Since then, Silatus has been able to serve over 30,000 users and they estimate that they have saved a collective 70,000 hours of people's time.

And they are not stopping there! Silatus wanted to expand the feature set, and offer user uploads, whilst maintaining its competitive pricing, starting at only $14 per month. As Silatus' co-founder and CEO Christopher Pratt succinctly explains:

Christopher Pratt

"We wanted to make it extremely easy for our users to bring their files – wherever they were – to Silatus in a controlled, privacy-aware and secure manner. Since we are a very lean startup, we needed a solution that we could integrate quickly, connect to the major remote cloud providers, and operate efficiently at scale with a great end-user experience, whilst still being able to offer our service for under $20 a month."

While there are many different options on the market, the team at Silatus eventually decided to go forward with Transloadit and Uppy. Christopher explains what made this choice so easy in the end:

"Transloadit and Uppy checked every box. Uppy has a great UI and UX, and it was super easy to integrate with. Transloadit came with all the capabilities we needed, like virus scanning, file conversion and file size testing, plus other advanced capabilities that we're excited to take advantage of in the future, such as AI image descriptions, automatic text translation and video encoding."

The customer is always right

Whilst the developer experience is always important, what ultimately decides a product's value is its value to the customer.

"Our customers are thrilled that we brought file uploads to Silatus so quickly, that it connects to all of the cloud storage services they use, and, most importantly, that it just works. File uploading has been a smash hit for us."

A generic office, photographed by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Transloadit saves you time

Typically, a feature like this would be something a team could deliberate over for months, without even accounting for any speed bumps along the way. All of that is time taken away from other aspects of the product, which startups can't afford.

Christopher explains how Silatus was able to completely avoid this worry, by using Transloadit and Uppy's ready-made solution:

"If we opted to run a customer file upload solution, it would have taken four sprints – or two months. Uppy took only a single sprint, or two weeks, a quarter of the time. Similarly, to build an in-house file processing pipeline would have taken an additional three sprints – or one-and-a-half months. Transloadit helped cut that down to one sprint, or two weeks, to get from investigation to production."

And that just covers the time saved. Rolling Uppy with Transloadit can help save on extra third-party services, too.

"Had we used a third-party service for our virus scanning and file conversions, it would have cost double what Transloadit offers."

Silatus' journey with Transloadit has only just started, and we are excited to see what the future holds. For more case studies just like this one, see the full list.