Unshackled.com

Background

Manchester-based Unshackled.com is a startup set to revolutionise the way consumers purchase and manage their mobile phones and contracts. Their vision was to simplify and unbundle mobile phone packages to give control back to the consumer and save them money, whilst breaking the existing mobile operator monopoly.

Currently, consumers are restricted by expensive and uncompetitive pre-bundled mobile phone packages. Unshackled aims to liberate the consumer by allowing them to pick their own phone, their own airtime package from a large variety of MVOs and resellers, and then acts as a broker to source the consumer the most competitive finance deal to fund the purchase.

Also, rather than tying consumers into lengthy fixed-term year contracts, Unshackled enables consumers to trade in and upgrade their existing mobile phone and watch for more competitive network deals through the Mobile Watch feature.

CEO John Whittle’s vision was that the ecommerce site was built on a solid and innovative technology platform, which positioned the retailer foremost as a technology company.

Unshackled selected tsf.tech as its technology partner as it met the criteria and had proven experience in building ecommerce platforms.

tsf.tech‘s chosen technology stack offers a reactive application development platform, which enables build of high-performance applications that are elastic, resilient and responsive on open source technology.

tsf.tech built a reactive ecommerce platform using open source technologies including Scala, Akka, and Cassandra, based on fully automated cloud-first architecture with a focus on fault tolerance, resilience and scalability.

tsf.tech built a reactive ecommerce platform using open source technologies.

By taking a ‘cloud-first’ approach and utilising programming language like Scala – which supports distributed cloud-computing workloads that require concurrency and parallelism – Unshackled will be able to maximise on the elasticity and cost effectiveness of the cloud, to scale its platform up and down in-line with consumer demand.

Using the AKKA framework – which is renowned for powering high volume financial services environments with near-zero downtime – tsf.tech has developed a high performance aggregation solution. The solution reaches out to mobile service providers, network operators and financial lenders, to create a personalised mobile package, while ensuring Unshackled has the ability to react quickly and outpace its competitors.

Finally, the solution has a Cassandra open-sourced database management system so it can handle large amounts of data to ensure high availability, so the consumer has the optimum online shopping experience.