Building an ERP - Should I keep using Convex?
Unanswered
oz posted this in #help-forum
ozOP
Hey all, wanted to get some thoughts from people who've scaled real-time apps.
What we're building:
Multi-tenant ERP for e-commerce - think order management, inventory tracking, product catalogs, analytics dashboards. Multi-org B2B setup where each business connects their BigCommerce (and soon Shopify). We sync orders, products, track inventory changes, and show analytics.
Stack: Next.js 16, Convex, Clerk for auth, Trigger.dev for background jobs, Knock for notifications.
The problem:
Convex is great for the real-time stuff - when an order comes in via webhook, everyone sees it instantly. Love that. But I'm hitting walls on:
1) Counts/aggregations - I need to show simple things like "You have 42,589 products" or "15,234 orders this month". Convex doesn't have COUNT. So I'm doing .collect() and counting in memory, which won't scale. I built pre-computed daily aggregate tables and a scheduled job that recomputes them, but it's clunky and I'm worried about costs at scale.
2) Analytics - Dashboards need things like revenue over time, top products, order trends. Right now I'm fetching order data and computing metrics on the fly with indexed date range queries. Works for now but feels like I'm fighting the database. Considered Tinybird or ClickHouse for analytics but then I'm maintaining two data pipelines.
3) Cost at scale - ERPs deal with a lot of data. Some customers could have 100k+ products and 500k+ orders. Convex bills by document reads/writes. When I need to aggregate across all that, the reads add up.
My concerns:
I'm building something meant to compete with NetSuite, SellerCloud, ERPNext tier stuff (eventually). Those are mature OLAP workloads. Am I gonna hit a ceiling with Convex?
Anyone running production workloads with high-volume aggregations on Convex? How are you handling counts/analytics? Or should I just accept I need a separate analytics store?
Bonus: Currently using Clerk for auth (org-based, invite-only, custom RBAC stored in Convex). It works but curious if anyone has better recs for B2B multi-tenant auth? Especially for this ERP use case.
What we're building:
Multi-tenant ERP for e-commerce - think order management, inventory tracking, product catalogs, analytics dashboards. Multi-org B2B setup where each business connects their BigCommerce (and soon Shopify). We sync orders, products, track inventory changes, and show analytics.
Stack: Next.js 16, Convex, Clerk for auth, Trigger.dev for background jobs, Knock for notifications.
The problem:
Convex is great for the real-time stuff - when an order comes in via webhook, everyone sees it instantly. Love that. But I'm hitting walls on:
1) Counts/aggregations - I need to show simple things like "You have 42,589 products" or "15,234 orders this month". Convex doesn't have COUNT. So I'm doing .collect() and counting in memory, which won't scale. I built pre-computed daily aggregate tables and a scheduled job that recomputes them, but it's clunky and I'm worried about costs at scale.
2) Analytics - Dashboards need things like revenue over time, top products, order trends. Right now I'm fetching order data and computing metrics on the fly with indexed date range queries. Works for now but feels like I'm fighting the database. Considered Tinybird or ClickHouse for analytics but then I'm maintaining two data pipelines.
3) Cost at scale - ERPs deal with a lot of data. Some customers could have 100k+ products and 500k+ orders. Convex bills by document reads/writes. When I need to aggregate across all that, the reads add up.
My concerns:
I'm building something meant to compete with NetSuite, SellerCloud, ERPNext tier stuff (eventually). Those are mature OLAP workloads. Am I gonna hit a ceiling with Convex?
Anyone running production workloads with high-volume aggregations on Convex? How are you handling counts/analytics? Or should I just accept I need a separate analytics store?
Bonus: Currently using Clerk for auth (org-based, invite-only, custom RBAC stored in Convex). It works but curious if anyone has better recs for B2B multi-tenant auth? Especially for this ERP use case.