$2 million saving for a major social platform that keeps real-device testing in-house with Cambrionix

Software QA teams rely on real devices because emulators cannot fully reflect end-user conditions. Many organisations begin by outsourcing testing to third-party device labs, but as release cycles accelerate, this model becomes costly, slower and harder to control.

The bigger issue is visibility. Once devices and tests enter a vendor’s queue, teams often cannot see progress, diagnose delays or understand whether failures are genuine hardware issues or vendor-side scheduling problems. This makes release planning harder and slows engineering response. At scale, the question becomes whether an in-house lab is cheaper, faster and easier to manage than an external test house. A global consumer social media platform faced this decision, when projected outsourcing test costs would be around $1 million per month.

Cambrionix helped its Engineering team build its device-testing lab in-house from the outset, using ThunderSync USB hubs.

ThunderSync delivered the device density needed without the USB endpoint limits and dropout issues of standard hubs, while Cambrionix Connect gave the team centralised visibility and remote management across every hub and device. This made it possible to run a large-scale lab without a proportional increase in headcount.