How CandyJar keeps fans hooked with perfect vertical video streaming
CandyJar replaced Cloudflare with bunny.net for instant playback and greater control, now streaming 80 million vertical episodes a month to over over 500K satisfied users.
Quick overview
Quick overview
Simpler development
Set codecs, resolutions, and bitrates from one dashboard or API.
Instant playback
Eliminated buffering as viewers scrolled between episodes.
Replaced Cloudflare
Eliminated buffering and setup friction immediately.
About CandyJar
About CandyJar
CandyJar, by Inkitt, is a vertical video platform for romance drama, with bite-sized, live-action episodes made for scrolling straight from one into the next. Inkitt started as a place for writers to publish novels and build a following, then launched Galatea, a reading app where its most promising stories reach paying readers.
CandyJar extends that journey into video, adapting the strongest performers into vertical series. With audiences across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, CandyJar is still building its fanbase, and its format hinges on instant playback: if a video doesn’t start the second someone scrolls, the spell breaks.
The challenges
The challenges
Before Inkitt had a proper CDN, it served files straight from Google Cloud Storage, and users saw image-heavy pages load slowly. That, plus rising storage costs, pushed the team toward a CDN. The sharper test came with CandyJar's video pipeline. In pre-launch testing, the team used Cloudflare for video delivery and hit friction on both sides.
Uploading media and retrieving stream URLs added unexpected complexity for the engineering team, while viewers saw buffering and stalled playback when scrolling between episodes, breaking the instant, social media-style experience the format depended on. The problems were particularly noticeable in Europe and the U.S. West Coast, regions the team didn't expect to be difficult, and Cloudflare's video pricing was markedly higher, too. CandyJar needed a solution that worked for both its engineers and its viewers.
“For both developer experience and end-user experience, I have only positive feedback about bunny.net. The setup was straightforward, and the dashboard gave me precise control over the codecs, resolutions, and bitrates I wanted. I couldn’t find a way to get that same level of control with Cloudflare. When we added Bunny Stream, our end-user experience improved immediately. You could scroll to the next episode, and it would start right away with no buffering.”
Nikita Varentsov
Inkitt
The solution
The solution
CandyJar moved its video pipeline to Bunny Stream, which now handles transcoding and adaptive delivery. Episodes started playing immediately without buffering, while Varentsov’s team gained direct control over codecs, resolutions, and bitrates from the bunny.net dashboard, a level of control he says he couldn’t find as easily with Cloudflare. The team handled the onboarding themselves, integrating Bunny Stream and the Pull Zone without needing implementation support.
Bunny Stream also carries the video posts users share on Inkitt's own social feed and Bunny CDN separately serves images and files across Inkitt's other two apps, Inkitt and Galatea. Finally, Bunny Optimizer handles image delivery with a fixed fee instead of Cloudflare’s per-transformation billing.
The results
The results
CandyJar and Galatea have grown to more than 1 million paid subscribers, with CandyJar's video pipeline alone streaming over 1 billion episodes since launch and about 80 million every month, all running on bunny.net's backbone. That reliability holds up the instant-scroll playback the format depends on and gives the team room to keep expanding.
Ironblood, Inkitt's newest AI-generated series, launched this year without infrastructure slowing it down.
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