A platform for different kinds of fundraising

RallyUp helps nonprofits, schools, charities, businesses, and community groups organize fundraising campaigns and events online. The platform brings several fundraising formats together, including crowdfunding, peer-to-peer campaigns, direct and recurring donations, raffles, sweepstakes, auctions, ticketed events, and merchandise sales. Organizations can use individual formats or combine them to create more involved fundraising experiences.

Today, RallyUp serves organizations of different sizes, from local community fundraisers to large international campaigns with hundreds of thousands of participants.

Much of the product roadmap comes directly from customer needs. As organizations explore new ways to raise funds and involve their supporters, they bring new requirements to the platform. RallyUp's development team works with these requirements and turns them into features that fit the existing product.

Growing alongside the product

AEX Soft began working with the client in 2012, when the original goal was to build a crowdfunding platform as an alternative to Kickstarter. After the first product launched, the client's business model evolved toward a SaaS platform built specifically for nonprofit fundraising. This brought a new set of engineering requirements: supporting different types of organizations, expanding the range of fundraising workflows, handling financial transactions, and accommodating much larger audiences.

Over the years, AEX Soft has remained involved as the product and its business have grown. The work has covered new feature development, architectural changes, infrastructure, integrations, and the ongoing maintenance of business-critical functionality.

Engineering challenges behind the platform

Handling traffic spikes during major campaigns

Fundraising campaigns can attract large audiences in a very short time, especially when well-known public figures or major charitable organizations are involved. These campaigns create sudden traffic spikes on top of the regular activity generated by existing users, putting considerable pressure on the platform.

RallyUp needs to keep its core workflows responsive throughout these periods. Since many campaigns are tied to scheduled events, even a brief interruption can affect donations and the experience of participants.

Supporting different organizations and workflows

As RallyUp developed into a multi-tenant SaaS platform, its architecture had to accommodate organizations with different requirements and usage patterns. The product also continued to expand into new fundraising formats, each bringing its own business rules and operational needs.

Auctions, raffles, donations, ticketing, and hybrid events all have different workflows, yet they need to work together within the same platform. Adding new capabilities also means accounting for their impact on existing functionality and keeping the overall product consistent.

Keeping financial transactions dependable

Payments sit at the center of RallyUp's operations. The platform processes donations and other fundraising transactions through providers such as Stripe and PayPal, so checkout and payment flows need particular attention to correctness and stability.

Security is another important part of the engineering work. RallyUp handles financial transactions and sensitive customer information, and its platform has passed SOC 2 and PCI-DSS audits. These requirements influence infrastructure decisions, development practices, operational procedures, and access controls.

Engineering the platform as it grows

AEX Soft focuses primarily on backend engineering, infrastructure, integrations, and new platform functionality. Much of the work involves understanding how a proposed change fits into the existing product and choosing an approach that supports the immediate requirement while keeping the platform maintainable.

Performance and infrastructure

To prepare RallyUp for campaign-related traffic spikes, the team introduced distributed caching, moved the hosting infrastructure to Amazon Web Services, and implemented automated scaling.

The architecture has also evolved into a modular .NET monolith supported by specialized microservices. This structure gives the team room to develop and operate specific components independently while keeping the core platform organized around its shared business logic.

Together, these improvements help RallyUp handle both sudden increases in traffic and the steady activity generated by organizations running campaigns throughout the year.

Multi-organization architecture

RallyUp serves many organizations through a shared product, with dedicated infrastructure instances for individual clients. This setup keeps their data and workloads isolated and gives the platform flexibility when it comes to scaling and managing individual environments.

As the product has grown, the team has continued to adapt its architecture to support new account types and more varied fundraising requirements.

Payments and integrations

The team works on some of RallyUp's most business-critical functionality, including payment integrations, checkout architecture, and transaction flows. Stripe and PayPal handle payment processing, while other integrations support the platform's wider operations.

The engineering scope also includes services such as SendGrid for transactional emails, along with reporting, data streaming, and supporting infrastructure.

New fundraising experiences

Customer requests frequently lead to new features, particularly when organizations need RallyUp to support fundraising formats they haven't used before.

Hybrid event support is a good example. Organizations wanted to combine online participation with activities taking place at a physical venue, including auctions where attendees could bid from either location.

The team developed functionality that brings both channels together. Online participants can place bids through the platform, while venue staff use a dedicated organizer app to record offline bids that sync immediately with the online auction. This lets organizers manage both audiences within the same event.

What RallyUp supports today

RallyUp has grown into a platform covering a broad range of online and hybrid fundraising activities. Organizations can use it to run:

• Crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.
• Direct donations and recurring giving.
• Online, live, and hybrid auctions.
• Raffles and sweepstakes.
• Ticket sales and event registration.
• Merchandise sales and custom fundraising experiences.
• Hybrid events combining online and in-person participation.

The platform's growth and technical capabilities are reflected in several milestones:

250,000 requests per second

RallyUp handled approximately 250,000 requests per second during a campaign run by Tom Holland's Brothers Trust. This remains the highest recorded production load for the platform.

Recognition among fast-growing U.S. companies

In 2021, RallyUp was recognized among the top 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the United States.

Security and compliance

The platform has passed SOC 2 and PCI-DSS audits, covering important aspects of its security and financial transaction environment.

Working together over the long term

The RallyUp engagement has changed considerably since its early days, and so has the way AEX Soft works with the client's team.

The collaboration involves ongoing development alongside regular discussions about product requirements and technical decisions. The Project Manager and Technical Lead join Product Owner meetings, helping connect business priorities with engineering considerations.

Before development starts, the team looks at the full use case: who needs the feature, how it fits into existing workflows, what dependencies it introduces, and which edge cases need attention. This gives developers a clearer understanding of the expected behavior and helps avoid problems that can arise when new functionality touches several parts of an established platform.

The engineering team consists primarily of .NET developers with a backend focus, covering business logic, databases, cloud infrastructure, and integrations. RallyUp's internal engineering and design teams handle UI/UX design, new frontend architecture, and most React development. AEX Soft works on existing interfaces and frontend changes needed to support its backend functionality.

The team uses Kanban to manage ongoing work, with production bugs, stability improvements, and performance taking priority over planned features. Code reviews and shared technical ownership also help keep platform knowledge distributed across the team.

This working arrangement has allowed AEX Soft to support RallyUp through changes in its business model, expanding product capabilities, and increasing engineering demands.

Experience with demanding transactional products

RallyUp brings together several engineering challenges common to products built around live participation and high-volume transactions. Its development has given AEX Soft hands-on experience with campaign-driven traffic spikes, payment-critical workflows, multi-organization architecture, and the gradual evolution of an established SaaS platform.

This experience is relevant to product companies building event-driven platforms, ticketing and fundraising systems, marketplaces, and other applications where large audiences and time-sensitive transactions put pressure on the underlying technology.

AEX Soft continues to work with RallyUp on platform development and maintenance, helping the product support its existing customers while accommodating new requirements.

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