Readwise → turbopuffer, the use-case that inspired turbopuffer's creation

Having our data in turbopuffer makes us feel ready for whatever comes next in AI-enabled software. It gives us the confidence to adapt quickly.

Tristan Homsi, Founder and CEO

Why turbopuffer?

Readwise is a reading platform that helps people collect, organize, and revisit books, articles, PDFs, and newsletters. The Readwise team needed a way for users to query across these entire libraries, not just single documents.

Other approaches fell short. Storing vectors in PostgreSQL wasn't scalable. Stuffing whole documents into context windows was too costly, limited by context size, and slow. Other vector databases were too expensive for a consumer subscription business.

turbopuffer gave Readwise a scalable foundation for retrieval. Even a user with 100,000 highlights can onboard immediately. This made advanced retrieval practical at consumer economics and allowed Readwise to focus on shipping highly requested features that were previously impossible to build, like allowing LLMs to reason with a user's book, article, and PDF highlights.

Readwise is special to the story of turbopuffer. Simon, turbopuffer co-founder, consulted with the Readwise team in 2022 to help them with a few infrastructure challenges. Simon worked with the team where they decided to not ship features because they were too costly to put in production on traditional search engines and vector databases. This was what inspired Simon was to build turbopuffer in 2023.

Results

Readwise implemented turbopuffer in less than one month and experienced:

1. 0 to 150M+ vectors ingested while keeping costs sustainable
2. 100K+ highlights ingested instantly for users with large libraries
3. One, simple unified solution for vector and full-text search across their app

turbopuffer scales effortlessly, even when we throw a hundred thousand data points at it at once. We've never had issues with downtime or rate limits; it just works.

Tristan Homsi, Founder and CEO

turbopuffer in Readwise

turbopuffer powers Readwise's new AI feature: Chat with Highlights. It enables readers to query the highlights they've saved from books, articles, and other sources:

Once the data is stored, turbopuffer retrieves it at scale. Readwise uses hybrid search to combine vector and full-text matching, ensuring queries return both semantic and exact keyword results quickly and accurately.

Looking ahead, Readwise is preparing to launch Chat with Your Entire Library. This feature expands retrieval from highlights to the full text of every book, article, and newsletter within a user's library, a scale increase of 10 to 100 times more data.