Case Study: Mintlify’s Migration to Chroma
“Migrating to Chroma removed the pain. No one’s getting woken up on call anymore. We all get to sleep through the night.”
Nick Khami
Engineering Manager, Mintlify
Mintlify
Stage Series A
HQ San Francisco, CA
Website mintlify.com
The Challenge
With tens of thousands of customers, Mintlify needed a search solution that could handle tens of thousands of collections, one per customer, with frequent index updates as documentation changed. With their previous search vendor, the team experienced regular downtime every 4-5 hours, with 10-minute outages that woke on-call engineers every night.
Beyond reliability issues, latency spikes were unpredictable. While typical P99 latency stayed around 100-200ms, sudden 10-second spikes would occur daily, degrading the user experience.
Why Mintlify Chose Chroma
After evaluating alternatives, Mintlify chose Chroma for three reasons.
Reliability. Chroma Cloud is built for high availability, which was critical for a team dealing with on-call incidents almost every night.
Feature fit. Mintlify depends heavily on SPLADE, a sparse vector keyword search technique that expands query keywords with synonyms to improve recall. Chroma's native support for SPLADE combined with dense vectors in hybrid search meant the best accuracy for their customers.
Scale. Because Mintlify has one collection per customer, Chroma Cloud's design for a single database to have hundreds of thousands of collections maps perfectly to their use case.
The Results
After migrating to Chroma, the on-call incidents stopped completely. Now that reliability was no longer a problem, Mintlify could focus on building product instead of monitoring infrastructure.
Performance increased as well:
- P50 latency: 20ms for both SPLADE and dense vector queries
- P90 latency: 70ms
- P99 latency: consistently bounded under 100ms with no spikes, even under load
Partnership Experience
"What surprised us most was the level of support ... It was a fantastically smooth experience." says Nick Khami, Engineering Manager at Mintlify. In addition to other engineers, Chroma CTO Hammad Bashir joined their Slack channel and worked with the Mintlify team daily throughout the migration.
Build fast, scalable, multi-tenant search with Chroma.