Freepik Company: Enabling beautiful design and creativity across the world with Google Cloud
About Freepik
Formed in Spain in 2010, Freepik launched as a platform offering free graphic resources to designers. Quickly gaining momentum and becoming one of the FT’s fastest growing startups in Europe, Freepik Company now comprises four verticals offering users millions of images, editable themes, and templates to help them create without limits.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usWith Google Kubernetes Engine at its core, Freepik Company has a highly scalable and stable infrastructure solution designed for improved performance, powerful analytics, and accelerated growth.
Google Cloud results
- Delivers smooth and responsive performance for users across the world with Google Kubernetes Engine
- Provides valuable insight on customer needs in near real-time with BigQuery
- Empowers developers to work at speed by removing dependencies on system administrators and reducing time to market
Reduces latency for users in Asia by more than two thirds.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but what if it doesn’t cost anything? Wouldn’t that be priceless? In 2010, the brothers Alejandro and Pablo Blanes founded Freepik, wanting to create a platform where designers could find free graphic resources. Over time, that platform grew into one of Europe’s fastest growing startups, offering users more than 33 million graphic resources. Over four verticals, Freepik Company’s users have an enormous range of options to enhance their projects, whether they’re planning party invitations or designing professional social media assets.
Recognizing that different users have different needs, the company has different ways of providing for its many different types of customers. Today, the company still offers millions of images to its users for free, but also provides a premium tier for professional work such as social media campaigns that might require higher quality images or more customization. "Our goal is to empower creators and creative people to make beautiful work," says Alejandro Gómez, CTO, Freepik Company. "We’re trying to make creativity and design accessible to everyone in the world. More than 97% of our user base is from outside Spain."
In recent years, Freepik Company made growth a priority objective, building on its momentum to reach new users in the Americas and Asia. By 2019, it became clear that its existing infrastructure solution had reached its limits. In order to build a truly global platform, the company turned to Google Cloud. "We were expanding but our infrastructure limited how quickly we could scale outside Europe, and also began to suffer from stability issues. We needed to solve this," says Gómez. "Google Cloud had the scalability, stability, and global reach that we were looking for."
"We were expanding but our infrastructure limited how quickly we could scale outside Europe, and also began to suffer from stability issues. We needed to solve this. Google Cloud had the scalability, stability, and global reach that we were looking for."
—Alejandro Gómez, CTO, FreepikMaking design accessible for everyone, everywhere
Freepik Company has an incredibly broad range of high quality pictures, but it’s more than just an image library. Key to its success is its approach to its customers. Rather than offer a single static library, Freepik Company put great effort into understanding the different types of people who use the platform and for what purpose. That resulted in Freepik Company rolling out a premium tier in addition to its fee content, as well as a range of verticals for different use cases. Anyone working on a presentation, for example, should look at SlidesGo and its extensive catalog of slide templates, while Flaticon offers countless icons for interfaces and Wepik helps people make unique creations with its online editing tool.
By expanding the type of content it provides and placing customer needs at the center of its product design, Freepik Company has propelled itself to the very top ranks of the stock image industry, gaining a worldwide following. But by 2019, the global nature of its user base was starting to impact its operations. With its existing Europe-based infrastructure, the company found that users in Asia or the Americas were experiencing more latency and stability issues compared with users in its European heartland.
In addition to solving its operational issues, Freepik Company wanted to improve the way it uses data to learn about customer needs. The latest analytics and AI tools require heavy compute power, which is often most effectively handled in the cloud. Freepik Company was already familiar with some aspects of Google Cloud, having integrated a few APIs with its on-premises infrastructure. By 2019, that familiarity led Freepik Company to choose Google Cloud as its infrastructure provider. "It was a natural choice for us, compared to all the other cloud providers," says Gómez. "Our developers knew how to use it, and we got a really good feeling when we talked to the team at Google Cloud. They seemed to understand what our needs were."
Building for growth with Google Kubernetes Engine
Rather than use virtual machines, Freepik Company’s new IT infrastructure is designed around Kubernetes, the open-source container technology designed at Google. Every service of the platform runs on Kubernetes clusters orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which provides powerful autoscaling options with stability and high performance all over the world.
A big factor in moving to the cloud was storage. With a growing collection of assets that already numbered millions, on-premises storage was becoming expensive and hard to manage for Freepik Company. With Google Cloud Storage, the company doesn’t have to worry about physical limitations or spend time trying to repair failed disks. Data is a hugely important part of Freepik Company’s operations, and BigQuery forms the core of Freepik Company’s analytics platform, providing a data warehouse that can ingest, process, and analyze data at scale and at speed. "BigQuery was a game-changer for us in terms of data analytics," says Gómez. "Before, with the amount of traffic we got, it wasn’t easy to analyze all of our data very quickly. But now we can gain insights into our customers’ behavior and needs in near real-time."
As Freepik Company expands into new markets, it has come to increasingly rely on Translation AI to automate translation and be able to distribute new features and updates to all its users across the world. Meanwhile, Cloud Armor has helped Freepik Company to adapt its security posture for the cloud and protect its assets from bad actors. From the outset, Freepik Company chose to use Google Cloud Consulting Services to help guide its migration to Google Cloud and get the most out of the platform. "The support from Google Cloud Consulting Services has been excellent and we have a great relationship with our technical account manager," says Gómez. "From the start, they have helped us get the right tools for the right job, so we could hit the ground running."
"The support from Google Cloud Consulting Services has been excellent and we have a great relationship with our technical account manager. From the start, they have helped us get the right tools for the right job, so we could hit the ground running."
—Alejandro Gómez, CTO, FreepikA platform for accelerated growth
With Google Cloud at its core, Freepik Company has built a truly global platform that provides top quality service to all its users, wherever they are in the world. Latency for Asian users has dropped from 1,500 milliseconds to 400—a reduction of more than two thirds. In addition, downtime has reduced from around five hours per year to around four minutes, for a highly stable design environment that customers can rely on. With a better performing, more stable infrastructure, Freepik Company’s employees have a more enjoyable, more productive working environment. "When we release a new update, it used to take us two to four hours to go live," says Gómez. "With Google Cloud, that process now takes less than twenty minutes. It means that we can release more often, which translates to a richer, more mature product for our customers."
Not only are developers working faster, they are also empowered by Google Kubernetes Engine to get creative. Previously, if a developer wanted to test an idea, it meant asking for server space and waiting to be admitted by systems administrators into a walled garden. "If a developer wanted to test something, there were a lot of dependencies and barriers in the old infrastructure as they waited for permissions," explains Gómez. "With Google Kubernetes Engine they can spin up their own environments with a few clicks and some lines of code and start testing and validating new ideas right away." Meanwhile, the systems administrators no longer have to worry about stability issues or maintenance, and can concentrate on enabling others in the business. "With Google Cloud, I don’t get woken up at 3am anymore and nor do the system administrators," says Gómez. "They used to spend more than half their time fixing infrastructure. Now they spend most of their time creating new infrastructure that adds value."
The quality of life improvements for both customers and employees at Freepik Company have helped the company grow to new heights with more than 120 million downloads per month and around 500,000 premium users. In June 2022, Freepik’s website drew 68.3 million visitors, making it the most visited stock image platform in the world that month. But Freepik Company’s relationship with Google Cloud has only just begun. The company is currently exploring Google Cloud AI and its suite of tools to see what more insight can be found within its datasets. Meanwhile, Freepik Company has started using Looker as a way to democratize the data it already collects, allowing employees to build their own dashboards and run their own reports. While the tools available with Google Cloud are important, for Freepik Company, the important thing is that "We want our technology partner to walk with us in our adventure," says Gómez. "Google Cloud isn't just our technology provider, it’s part of our team."
"When we release a new update, it used to take us two to four hours to go live. With Google Cloud, that process now takes less than twenty minutes. It means that we can release more often, which translates to a richer, more mature product for our customers."
—Alejandro Gómez, CTO, FreepikTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Freepik
Formed in Spain in 2010, Freepik launched as a platform offering free graphic resources to designers. Quickly gaining momentum and becoming one of the FT’s fastest growing startups in Europe, Freepik Company now comprises four verticals offering users millions of images, editable themes, and templates to help them create without limits.