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Case Study: Reforge saves 18 hours a week and 3x's its team with Metaplane

Reforge Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk
Key facts · TL;DR
Company
Reforge
Industry
E-Learning
Challenge
A Postgres warehouse timed out under growing demand, and untracked direct changes broke downstream data.
Headline result
Reforge saved 18 hours a week and supported 350% team growth on a Snowflake, dbt, and Metaplane stack, with Metaplane making the data team first to know of issues

Key results

18 hrs/wk
Time saved
data team
350%
Team growth supported
on Snowflake + dbt + Metaplane stack

The challenge

As Reforge grew into a full SaaS business, demand for metrics like new revenue, retention, and churn exploded. Its original Postgres warehouse routinely timed out, and data models managed in the engineering team's GitHub repo were slow to change, so the team often made quick edits directly in the warehouse with no version control, breaking downstream data. Managing thousands of Snowflake objects, the data team was often the last to learn of quality issues.

The solution

Reforge migrated to Snowflake with dbt for version-controlled modeling and CI/CD, and added Metaplane for data observability. Metaplane monitors the data pipelines and reports issues back, so the team is alerted immediately when, for example, an engineer loads contacts to the wrong place.

Because of Metaplane, I spook people with how quickly I find data issues now.

DW
Daniel Wolchonok
Head of Data, Reforge

The results, in context

On the Snowflake, dbt, and Metaplane stack, Reforge saved 18 hours a week and supported 350% team growth. BI and transformation queries that once took hours now run in minutes, and Metaplane makes the data team the first to know about quality issues, with a starting point for root cause and downstream impact.

Products used

Metaplane Metaplane