Discover how Peloton streamlined its data infrastructure and boosted financial insights using Airbyte

‍About Peloton

Peloton Interactive revolutionized the fitness industry by bringing the energy and community of boutique studio classes into people's homes. Founded in 2012, the company offers connected fitness equipment—including bikes, treadmills, and rowing machines—paired with live and on-demand classes that create an immersive workout experience.

With millions of members across the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia, Peloton has built one of the most engaged fitness communities in the world. The company's products combine cutting-edge hardware with software that tracks performance metrics, enables real-time leaderboard competition, and fosters social connections that keep members motivated.

At Peloton, data isn't just a business tool—it's central to the member experience and company strategy. From tracking individual workout metrics to analyzing company-wide performance, data drives decisions at every level.

Fragmented data tools create operational headaches

When Amy, Leader of the Data Engineering team at Peloton, looked at her team's infrastructure after several years of rapid growth, she saw a patchwork of solutions that was becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

"Data is key to strategy at Peloton. And our senior leadership team is definitely investing in data-driven decision making," Amy explained. The company has "weekly metrics that are shared with senior leadership to make critical business decisions and identify opportunities."

But the infrastructure supporting this data culture had evolved organically, creating significant challenges. The team was managing pipelines across Stitch Data, Informatica, Fivetran, and numerous custom in-house solutions.

"As you scale, moving data across distributed systems becomes much more difficult. Maintaining multiple pipelines had many challenges," Amy noted. 

Consolidation initiative drives search for a unified solution

About 2-3 years ago, Peloton's data team embarked on an ambitious consolidation project. "We wanted to save on time and costs by consolidating our tools. Operational efficiency was critical to our growing business needs," Amy recalled. One of her engineers showed her Airbyte, and they decided to test out the platform.

The team had specific requirements for their new solution:

"Ease of use was the most important thing. We don’t want a huge learning curve for new users before they start leveraging the tool to create value."

Additionally, they needed broad connector coverage: "This a huge advantage with Airbyte. The connector library is extensive compared to our other options, and that allows us to leverage it for infrastructure consolidation."

Critically, security and data sovereignty were paramount: "We needed an on-premise solution. Since our business is based on subscriptions, we have highly sensitive member data and need to keep it in our environment. All in all, Airbyte was the right solution to meet all of our key requirements."

Infrastructure-as-code brings control and speed

What particularly impressed Amy's team was Airbyte's approach to configuration. "What's different from Stitch Data or Informatica is the way that we can configure Airbyte connections and Airbyte entities through code. That's a huge plus to us as data engineers, because we are used to checking code and being able to manage changes from Github," she emphasized.

The dedication to flexible configuration and user comfort is key to Airbyte’s open source and community driven origins, and was a huge success for Amy’s team. The implementation allowed Peloton to deprecate Stitch Data and Informatica entirely, maintaining only a small subset of legacy pipelines in Fivetran for lower volume data feeds.

Finance project showcases Airbyte's impact

The true value of Airbyte became clear during a critical finance initiative. "We had a project where we integrate order data and payment information so that we can analyze which orders are closed, and calculate revenue. The data is stored in two different tools, Shopify and Stripe.”

The results exceeded expectations: "With Airbyte, we were able to pull down all the historical payment information from Shopify and Stripe within one week.” This rapid delivery demonstrated the productivity gains Airbyte enabled, allowing the team to meet urgent business needs with unprecedented speed.

Airbyte provides both significant cost and productivity gains for Peloton

While Amy couldn't share specific numbers, she confirmed: "We definitely saved when we consolidated from Stitch Data and Informatica. To put it plainly, it was not an insignificant amount.”

Perhaps most importantly, the platform has transformed how quickly the team can respond to business needs: "Being able to have a way to quickly put something together and with minimal development effort sets up a framework that feeds into our business is a gamechanger. It allows us to operate more efficiently with a smaller team."

Key Results

• Unified three disparate data ingestion platforms into a single, code-based infrastructure
• Accelerated finance project delivery by pulling all historical payment data in just one week
• Eliminated fragmented pipeline management across Stitch Data, Informatica, and custom solutions
• Reduced engineering effort with quick setup and minimal learning curve for new pipelines
• Achieved significant cost savings compared to maintaining multiple vendor contracts

Looking ahead

As Peloton continues to evolve its data infrastructure, Airbyte has proven to be a foundational component that scales with their ambitions. The platform has transformed how the data team operates, enabling them to rapidly respond to business needs and support new initiatives.

“The data quality is good. And we have increased observability into how our data sets are doing," Amy said. 

Airbyte has become an essential tool that enables Peloton to maintain its data-driven culture while reducing operational complexity. With a unified data ingestion platform in place, Peloton's data engineering team is now positioned to focus on strategic initiatives that drive member engagement and business growth, confident that their data infrastructure can handle whatever challenges come next.