Software requirements based on monthly traffic

When you’re developing or expanding software, you probably first think about features, usability, and integrations. But what’s often underestimated is how much your software’s capacity depends on the amount of traffic it can handle. Whether you have 100 or 100,000 users per month, your software requirements will differ and you need to plan ahead.

Why monthly traffic affects technical choices

Your monthly traffic isn’t just a marketing metric; it’s a technical boundary condition. Every visitor or user makes demands on your system: loading a page, requesting data, submitting a form, or logging in. When you have low traffic, your system is often forgiving.

Errors go unnoticed, load times stay reasonable, and even a poorly optimized database doesn’t reveal itself immediately. But as your traffic grows, that changes. Suddenly, every delay, error, or unstable integration is magnified. Your software needs to not only function but stay reliable, scale with your usage, and keep performing quickly.

As traffic increases, your software must:

• Pick up the past in terms of load speed
• Remain stable, even during traffic spikes
• Be secure and scalable

If it doesn’t, you risk losing users at critical moments. Or worse, having your entire system crash. And that’s not just annoying; it can damage your reputation. Want to grow? Start by asking how much traffic your software can handle now and how much it may need to support in the future. Because your monthly user numbers don’t just show your success; they determine the technical future-readiness of your product.

What are typical traffic thresholds?

So when does your traffic become a technical challenge? Below are the most common traffic thresholds and what they mean for your software’s technical setup.

Up to 1,000 users per month

With up to around 1,000 monthly users, there’s usually little technical complexity. Your application often runs fine on a standard server without advanced measures.

This level of traffic is easy to handle for simple apps like small client portals, internal tools, or websites with a limited reach. On the technical side, it stays straightforward: shared hosting or a light VPS is typically enough, caching needs are minimal, and a simple database setup works well.

1,000–10,000 users per month

When your software attracts 1,000 to 10,000 users per month, it starts playing a serious role in your daily business operations. Think employee portals, project tracking systems, or client dashboards where data is constantly processed and shared. At this stage, you need to go beyond the basics.

You’ll reach a point where caching becomes essential to keep your app fast, your database needs optimization to handle peaks, and monitoring helps catch issues early. It’s also smart to consider custom hosting or container technologies like Docker, giving you more control over scalability and stability.

10,000–100,000 users per month

From around 10,000 to 100,000 monthly users, performance becomes critical. Your software is no longer running quietly in the background. It’s actively used at scale, like a SaaS platform, a tool processing real-time data, or a large client portal.

In this phase, your infrastructure must handle serious loads. That means using load balancing to distribute traffic, deploying scalable systems like Kubernetes or cloud autoscaling, and setting up your database for lightning-fast access through techniques like partitioning. Advanced logging becomes essential, too: you want real-time insights into what’s happening, where things go wrong, and how to act quickly.

100,000+ users per month

When your software serves over 100,000 users a month, it becomes part of your organization’s or even society’s critical infrastructure. Think platforms for municipalities or healthcare providers, B2B solutions with wide adoption, or self-service systems used by thousands of people simultaneously.

At this level, it’s not just about speed and ease of use but also reliability and security. Your system needs high availability, fault tolerance through redundancy, and a microservices architecture for flexible scaling. Security ramps up, too, with Web Application Firewalls (WAF), rate limiting, and regular performance and stress testing. At this stage, downtime is not an option. Your software must perform like a mission-critical service.

What your software needs as your traffic grows

Where 100 users might get by with a simple server and minimal caching, thousands or tens of thousands of users per month require you to consider:

Load balancing

Imagine 1,000 people visiting your website at the same time. Without load balancing, a single server has to handle it all, which quickly becomes overwhelming. Load balancing distributes visitors across multiple servers so everything keeps running smoothly.

Asynchronous processing

A user submits a form. Instead of your software waiting to complete every task (like sending emails, saving data, creating notifications), it immediately responds with “We’ve received your form!” and processes the rest in the background. This keeps the experience fast and user-friendly.

Smart caching

If every visitor loads the same product page, you don’t need to pull everything from the database each time. By caching the page, it loads much faster.

Database indexing

If you store 10,000 customer names and someone searches for “Smith,” it can take a long time without indexing. With indexing, your database knows exactly where to look. Almost like using a book’s table of contents.

Real-time monitoring and error detection

If your website slows down or a component fails, you see it instantly in your dashboard or get alerted. This lets you act quickly, often before your users notice.

What does this mean for you?

The requirements you set for your software don’t just depend on what you’re building but on how many people you’re building it for. Do you need an MVP for your team, or a platform for thousands of customers? By mapping your expected traffic early, you’ll avoid surprises and make better choices.

Ask yourself these questions

• What architecture matches your growth plans?
• Which technologies and infrastructure are scalable enough?
• When should you invest in performance and security?

Need help?

At Rocksolid Development , we think about your software’s scalability from day one, whether you’re just starting out or already have tens of thousands of users. We build solutions that help you today and in the future.