When the product direction changes, the platform has to follow

Most growing companies hit the moment where they decide to go all-in on a new product direction. Maybe it's a pivot, maybe it's a new product line, maybe it's a bet on AI. Whatever the trigger, the engineering team suddenly needs to build something ambitious from scratch, and fast, while making infrastructure decisions they'll have to live with for years.

That's exactly where Pallet found themselves. A Series-B funded supply chain technology company, Pallet had spent three years building a traditional logistics system of record (TMS). In early 2025, they made the call to pivot and build an enterprise AI logistics platform for supply chain companies.

It was a greenfield moment. New architecture, new requirements, new stakes. CTO Nilkanth Patel needed to stand up a production-grade backend quickly, without making the kind of shortcuts that would slow the team down 1-2 years later.

The challenge: speed now, without paying for it later

The Pallet team had clear requirements:

• Event-driven architecture. Everything in the system would be triggered by events.
• Fast local development. Previous experience with Django and Rails meant 30+ second reload times, which was unacceptable.
• No infrastructure overhead. No one on the team wanted to manage Terraform, service accounts, or deployment pipelines.
• Real cloud providers. They wanted to be on GCP, AWS, or Azure for enterprise customer trust and long-term viability. Not locked into a PaaS like Render or Supabase.
• Fast developer onboarding. The team was growing quickly, so new engineers needed to be productive fast.

Why Pallet chose Encore

The team evaluated Hono, Bun, Elysia, and FastAPI, with a preference for TypeScript. Nilkanth discovered Encore when researching TypeScript API frameworks and quickly saw that it solved for more than just the framework layer.

What sealed the decision was Encore's unique combination of benefits:

1. Infrastructure as code, but actual code. Not Terraform, but real TypeScript objects that automatically provision the right cloud resources.
2. Cloud-native without the lock-in. All resources live in Pallet's own Google Cloud, fully visible and portable.
3. Zero to deployed in an hour. A service with Postgres, bucket storage, and Pub/Sub was running on GCP in under an hour.
4. Multi-environment support from day one. Staging, QA, and production environments were stood up without a month-long setup project.
5. Event-driven primitives. Pub/Sub setup that "just works," which alone was enough to justify the platform for their event-driven system.

How Nilkanth describes Encore

Over a year later: still fast

Pallet needed to move fast on day one without paying for it later. Over a year in, that's exactly what they got. The team is running 4 environments on GCP, shipping faster than ever, on infrastructure that's grown with them rather than holding them back.

• Fast iteration cycles. Local compilation is near-instant compared to 30+ second reloads with previous frameworks.
• Smooth team adoption. The framework is "pretty invisible" to engineers who just want to write business logic.
• No dedicated DevOps hire needed. Encore's platform acts as the team's "DevOps department" for their core services and infrastructure.
• Event-driven architecture at scale. Pub/Sub that would otherwise be a pain to manage is orchestrated automatically.

Key takeaway

For experienced engineers building enterprise products, Encore offers the rare combination of day-one productivity with long-term infrastructure maturity. Pallet gets the ease of a PaaS with the trust and portability of running directly on GCP, and they shipped their AI logistics platform in a fraction of the time it would have taken with traditional tooling.