How Vinted Runs 10 to 12 Million Workflows a Day with Temporal While Keeping Dev Velocity High and Costs Low

The Customer

From fashion to electronics, Vinted helps users buy and sell second-hand items that still has stories to tell. As Europe’s leading online marketplace for second-hand clothing and the go to destination for all kinds of second-hand items, it connects millions of people across 20+ countries, making it easy to give your jeans, sneakers, or vintage finds a second life

Behind the scenes, Vinted coordinates the full user journey: everything from payments to shipping. That includes ensuring that sellers are paid when buyers confirm their item is exactly what they expected. It’s great for trust, but it also makes for some pretty complex, asynchronous backend logic. This is where Vinted’s challenge began.

The Challenge

A tried-and-true stack of Ruby, Sidekiq, many custom state machines, and cleanup jobs powered Vinted for years. It worked until the team realized they could do better

As the product matured, so did the complexity of its payment flows. Transactions could involve multiple payment methods, timing sensitivities, and conditional logic based on user input or vendor response. And when you’re working with background jobs that don’t know what the others are doing, things start to break in very subtle (and very painful) ways.

Failures didn’t come as dramatic crashes, in fact, they trickled in rather unsuspectingly. Since logic was scattered things would fail in unexpected ways which would usually end up with members contacting customer support.

“Everything is fine until it's not. That’s why we focused on reliability — because keeping members happy is what keeps them coming back.” — Gytis Ramanauskas, Staff Engineer

The Solution

Vinted turned to Temporal to bring order into their payment ecosystem with their first move being rewriting a background refund and invalidation flow. They chose this as their first course of action because it’s: not user-facing, low risk, and perfect for testing the waters.

Following that, the rate of adoption surged.

Temporal gave them:

• Readable, top-to-bottom Workflows that removed indirection and clarified logic
• Parallelism out of the box, speeding up flows that used to be serialized and slow
• Clear visibility using the Temporal UI, making state transitions and failures easy to track
• Feature flag control, letting them run Temporal and legacy flows side-by-side
• Flexible deployment options — OSS self-hosted for their core platform, and Temporal Cloud for greenfield services on AWS

“We outlined the class diagram of our intertwined old logic and then a Temporal Workflow doing the same thing top to bottom. That’s all it took to get the buy-in.” — Gytis Ramanauskas, Staff Engineer

The Results

Today, Vinted runs 10 to 12 million Workflows and Activities per day on Temporal in payments alone. It’s become a core part of their infrastructure, with a goal to rewrite major payment flows in Temporal by the end of 2025.

The results speak for themselves. They achieved:

• Cleaner, simpler code that’s easier for developers to read, test, and change
• Lower infrastructure costs by self-hosting Temporal OSS in their on-prem data centers
• Higher reliability from built-in retries, locking, and consistent execution

“The results speak for themselves. Less glue and much more cohesion with retries for free” — Gytis Ramanauskas, Staff Engineer

The Takeaways

Vinted's success is partly due to the team's initial focus on achievable goals. They chose to start with a background process that wouldn’t affect users if it failed, used it as a proving ground, and expanded from there. That first success gave them the confidence (and the internal buy-in) to go all in.

One of the biggest lessons they walked away with is that education matters. Early adopters tried to port old patterns directly into Workflows — passing giant payloads, forgetting Ruby’s implicit returns, and triggering serialization issues. Instead of scolding the team, Vinted took things in stride and leaned into enablement: code reviews, learning sessions, and a very clear “do this, not that” guide.

They also had to understand what good observability in Temporal looks like. The full picture wasn't shown by CPU and memory alone. Instead, they started watching Temporal-specific metrics: schedule-to-start latency, execution delays, and task queue saturation. That shift helped them catch issues early — before customers had even the slightest clue.

And maybe most important: they embraced Temporal as more than just a tool, they went all in and adopted it as a new way of thinking. One where failure is expected and handled, where Workflows reflect business logic directly, and where scale doesn’t require complex orchestration hacks.

If you’d like to improve your process just like Vinted did, start with a free trial of Temporal Cloud with $1,000 in free credits.