Customer story
How Formbricks kept its serverless backend online under load with Prisma Accelerate
Formbricks, an open-source survey and feedback platform, hit a scaling wall running its cloud version on a serverless backend. A usage spike blew past its database connection limit and took the database down. Prisma Accelerate's connection pooling solved it, and the setup was simple enough to do at 3 a.m. mid-incident.
Customer
About Formbricks
Formbricks is an open-source, privacy-first survey and feedback platform. It lets businesses gather user insights through in-app surveys, website surveys, link-based questionnaires, and email surveys, with prebuilt data analysis built in as an experience-management solution.
Industry
Open-source survey / experience management
Deployment
Cloud version on Vercel, serverless backend
Using
Prisma Accelerate (connection pooling)
The challenge
Formbricks runs its cloud version on Vercel with a serverless backend, and that architecture ran into a hard limit. Serverless functions open lots of short-lived database connections, and Formbricks exceeded its connection pool size, hitting performance bottlenecks along the way.
Then a significant usage spike pushed it over the edge: the database failed and server load climbed, forcing an urgent need for something more robust.
Serverless exhausts connections. Many concurrent functions meant more database connections than the pool could hold.
A spike became an outage. Growing traffic tipped bottlenecks into a database failure.
Alternatives were too expensive. Options like AWS RDS Proxy existed, but the cost was prohibitively high.
Why Formbricks chose Prisma Accelerate
Formbricks needed connection pooling built for serverless, without the price tag of the heavier alternatives. Prisma Accelerate offered an accessible, cost-effective option with a low barrier to entry, and it was straightforward enough to set up in the middle of an incident.
Connection pooling for serverless
A scalable pool that manages many database connections without exhausting the limit.
Cost-effective by comparison
A low entry barrier where alternatives like AWS RDS Proxy were prohibitively expensive.
Simple to set up
Create an account, swap the connection string, connect the database, done, even at 3 a.m.
“It's also possible to set up Accelerate when you're totally tired at 3 a.m. in the morning. The process was pretty straightforward – created an account, replaced the connection string, and connected the database on the Prisma Accelerate website. It was easy and worked out, even under those high-pressure circumstances.”
Matti Nannt
Co-Founder, Formbricks
How they use Prisma
Formbricks put Prisma Accelerate in front of its database to handle connection pooling for the serverless backend. The setup was deliberately minimal: create a Prisma Accelerate account, replace the connection string, and connect the database through the Accelerate website, which is exactly what they did during the database-failure incident at 3 a.m.
With Accelerate's scalable connection pool in place, the serverless architecture could manage large numbers of database connections while holding performance during traffic surges.
generator client {
provider =
}
model User {
id String @id @default(cuid())
email String @unique
DateTime
posts Post[]
}
model Post {
String @id
author User @relation
}
Schema valid
The results
The integration resolved Formbricks' scalability problems and strengthened its serverless backend against future spikes.
Serverless scaling, solved
Connection pooling that keeps serverless from exhausting the database.
Held up under surges
The pool manages many connections while maintaining performance during traffic spikes.
Set up mid-incident
Configured at 3 a.m. during a live database failure.
Build on the same stack as Formbricks
If your serverless backend is straining its database connections, Prisma can take the pressure off.
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