DFS Army
A daily fantasy sports platform migrated off WordPress and Google Sheets with paying subscribers live throughout — then run and grown for 6+ years.
- +20%revenue in year one
- 0downtime during cutover
- 6+ yrsembedded, ongoing
Where they started
DFS Army had real traction: a paying subscriber base that depended on daily data to build fantasy lineups. The platform behind it was WordPress with Google Sheets as the data layer. Only a few seasons of historical data were usable, page loads were slow, and every data update was operational work for the team.
The risky part wasn't the rebuild. It was that the business couldn't pause for one. Subscribers paid monthly and used the product daily — an outage during migration meant refunds and churn.
What we changed
We rebuilt the platform on a MEAN stack with Polars ETL pipelines behind it, and ran the migration with zero downtime — the WordPress product stayed live and serving paying subscribers until the moment the new platform took over.
- Polars ETL pipelines replaced the Google Sheets data layer, cutting manual update work out of daily operations.
- Decades of historical data — previously inaccessible beyond a few seasons — became queryable, which made simulations possible as a product feature.
- Page and data performance were treated as requirements, not aspirations: pages under 2 seconds, data loads under 500ms.
Results
The engagement didn't end at launch. bytesquad has been DFS Army's embedded technical team for 6+ years and counting.
- ClientDFS Army
- EngagementPlatform migration + long-term support
- FromWordPress + Google Sheets
- ToMEAN stack + Polars ETL pipelines
- DowntimeZero, subscribers live throughout
- Relationship6+ years, ongoing
Running a product that can't afford to pause?
Zero-downtime migration is our standard, not our stretch goal.