So it starts with my wife. She started selling on Amazon, and I was helping out after my day job with operations. And I was just swamped in CSV files, creating reports, and reporting back to the CEO, the wife. And I knew there had to be a better way with how we were creating reports, getting data. And that's what led me to what we now have as Gorilla ROI. Our unique selling proposition is that we don't have any dashboard, we don't have a user interface. We strictly get the data from across different e-commerce platforms, and then we deliver it straight into a Google Sheet for people to start working with and manipulating, and that just eliminates so much work and just really streamlines and automates the process for people that are selling online. Being a small business, we were looking for a cloud solution that pretty much offered the best balance of cost and benefits. The biggest problem that we kept encountering was that the pricing was often unpredictable. We were able to make a very objective decision simply based on the pricing. We knew we needed this, this, this, this, this. Akamai was going to be at priced at this, this, this.
And then we just easily competitive with AWS and Azure, and Akamai just beat them hands down. In the beginning stages, we were still uncertain as we were transitioning over to ThaiDB, exactly how much resources and how much stress the system was going to be able to handle and would be able to perform. And Akamai actually gave us bonus resources to stress test the entire system in a real-world scenario. So that support just blew us away. I would never get that type of support from, say, AWS or even other competitors, and it really helped us validate the migration at scale without blowing our budget. And Akamai, with the additional resources now, continues to introduce new features and new services, and also just having contact at Akamai to address some of our needs, it's a significant advantage.
Turning spreadsheet chaos into clean, reliable insights
Gorilla ROI is a lean start-up on a powerful mission: turn the messiest ecommerce data into clean insights sellers can actually use. Founded by CEO Jae Jun after he tried to scale an Amazon marketplace business, Gorilla ROI eliminates the dashboards and clutter, delivering real-time marketplace data directly into sellers’ favorite tool: Google Sheets. By replacing cheap hosting solutions with Akamai cloud computing services, it gained reliable, cost-effective infrastructure backed by responsive support — and a foundation for growth.
No dashboards, no fluff: Just clean data where sellers work
“I was burning out trying to help my wife run her Amazon store after hours. Drowning in CSVs, I thought there had to be a better way,” Jun recalled. Gorilla ROI was born from that frustration. Today, it supports hundreds of online sellers with fast, clean, automated data integrations across platforms like Amazon and Shopify.
What makes Gorilla ROI unique is the lack of a dashboard and cluttered UI. “We just deliver reliable data into Google Sheets, where our users are already working,” Jun said.
With just five engineers and two UX designers, the Gorilla ROI team built a high-performance back-end infrastructure to support this lightweight yet powerful experience. The simplicity of the user experience belies the technical complexity underneath. Gorilla ROI processes massive data volumes with real-time inserts, deletions, and calculations — all while maintaining uptime for customers making business decisions on the fly.
Choosing Akamai over AWS and Azure
In its early days, Gorilla ROI needed infrastructure that was both powerful and budget-friendly. “We were bootstrapped. Everyone assumes you’ll go with AWS or Azure, but we couldn’t afford unpredictable costs,” said Jun. “We needed something stable that we could easily forecast.”
Jun and his team had tried low-cost hosting solutions, but downtime and inconsistent performance forced them to look elsewhere. The company’s CTO had experience with Linode, now Akamai Cloud, and appreciated the consistent performance and predictable costs.
Tackling technical challenges, simply
As Gorilla ROI scaled, so did its technical challenges. “Software development is like a never-ending construction project,” said Jun. The team started with Percona XtraDB for high availability, but ran into bottlenecks and downtime. Gorilla ROI eventually migrated to TiDB, which solved insertion and deletion delays, and made adding database nodes a process of hours instead of days.
“With Akamai, we stress-tested our new database and validated the migration at scale with real-world scenarios using bonus resources they gave us. That support blew us away. We couldn’t get that level of care from AWS or other hyperscalers,” Jun said.
For unstructured data, Gorilla ROI relies on MongoDB. Everything is supported by Akamai cloud computing NodeBalancers, VMs, and shared compute instances. “Deployment is fast and easy. We don’t need expensive specialists or a huge team to keep things running.”
Sticking with Akamai after the acquisition
After Akamai acquired Linode, Jun was skeptical. “You worry that a big company will mean more bureaucracy, higher costs, and less personal support. But it’s been the opposite. We still get simple-to-use, powerful tools and now have access to even more features and even better service.”
Having a direct line to Akamai’s support team, rather than a generic ticketing system, was a huge win. “One word I’d use for our Akamai account team is ‘supportive.’ They’ve been with us every step of the way,” he continued.
Powering developer agility and scale
Jun credits Akamai with enabling his team to stay lean and agile. “We don’t need expensive certifications or niche expertise to manage our infrastructure. Everyone on our team understands the system, which means more redundancy, less risk, and lower personnel costs.”
The infrastructure is designed to let Gorilla ROI move rapidly. “We can quickly and easily spin up and take down new compute instances as needed. That kind of flexibility lets us proactively focus on innovation instead of reactively addressing our needs,” he said.
Smooth sailing: From chaos to confidence
Before switching to Akamai, Jun remembers dealing with constant “fires” and downtime. “Our CTO couldn’t even enjoy vacation. He was always on call trying to fix server issues. Now, he knows Akamai has it covered. It just works.”
That shift has transformed Gorilla ROI’s operations. The infrastructure now quietly supports everything in the background, and is predictable, reliable, and cost efficient.
“Architecture should be like the foundation for a house. You don’t want to think about it every day. It should just be stable and work,” said Jun. “That’s exactly what Akamai gives us.”
Growing business on a trusted foundation
Gorilla ROI’s v2 infrastructure is now live, supported by Akamai cloud computing services. It’s designed to support thousands of users with no loss in performance. “We used to struggle scaling to a few hundred users. Now we can handle thousands,” said Jun.
With a solid foundation in place, Gorilla ROI is focused on growing its user base, adding new integrations, and continuing to simplify data access for online sellers. “In addition to providing the infrastructure we need, Akamai makes it easy to budget and plan. We can project costs within a 10% range without a finance guru running complex models. That ease and predictability is priceless when you’re growing,” Jun concluded.
About Gorilla ROI
Gorilla ROI’s philosophy is to make data work for you. Founded in 2018, Gorilla ROI is a data connector for Amazon and Shopify that syncs sales, orders, inventory, and more into Google Sheets. It was created to eliminate manual data gathering, giving you the freedom to create unique reports and gain insights. Turn static spreadsheets into automated, always-current dashboards you can trust.
About Akamai
Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence. Learn more at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on X and LinkedIn.
