This is one of the best businesses I have heard of. Even 6-7 years back, Sidekiq was grossing $80k/month [1]. I imagine it must be much more now. No servers to maintain, no employees, minimal support work and Mike has the complete freedom to work on updates whenever he prefers. Almost entire revenue minus payment processing costs must be profit. Imagine making $1M / yr working only 10-20hrs per week (Don't wish to presume here, but that's my estimate of the man-hours it costs to run).<p>> I still have 0 employees and don't plan to hire. I tune my business processes to run as lean as possible: Most of my customers are on credit card so their payments are automatic. The gem servers take about one day of maintenance per year. I can't really outsource much of my support work because it is so technical and specialized.<p>> My gem server is a $6 droplet on DigitalOcean. Because gems are just static files, that little droplet can handle millions of requests per day with just Apache. Oh, and I run three servers in parallel for failover purposes for a grand total of $18/mo.<p>I wonder what makes Sidekiq special? I don't imagine any equivalent product (background job processing) in the other languages is raking in that much, if making any revenue in the first place.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/product/sidekiq" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/product/sidekiq</a>
Mike Perham's Sidekiq was what I modeled my own business, EmailEngine, after. I took my decade's worth of expertise in email protocol implementations (I also run the open-source Nodemailer library) and built an email gateway app my customers can download and run on their machines or servers. Just like Sidekiq Pro, the customers need an active subscription to run it, but the app runs on their premises, and they maintain it. I only run the key generation and validation server, which costs me around $50 per month, including all the backups and so on.<p>I quit my job to go full in with EmailEngine exactly one year ago, when MRR for EmailEngine was $500, now it is $3,900 and steadily growing. I do work full time on it, but the result is async - the work I put into EmailEngine today brings me income sometime later, and the recurring income I receive today is unrelated to any effort I put into the company right now.
"I toyed with Sidekiq.js but decided to kill that idea real quick because, as we all know, JavaScript is terrible"<p>This is why I love the ruby community, so much sense :)
Sidekiq is one of my favorite things about using Ruby, I include it in my short list every time a "Why use Ruby?" question gets asked. I miss it desperately when I work in other languages. I plan on giving Faktory a shot ASAP.<p>Mike has always struck me as a great guy, really the kind of person who you're happy to know is building one of your favorite tools. In a world of starving open source contributors and mega corps throwing around weight, his success with Sidekiq stands out. It makes me very happy to see.
Sidekiq Pro is great, we're paying for it! 10k a year I think.<p>But for people who are interested in alternatives, I'd also suggest Good Job (runs on Postgresql).<p><a href="https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job">https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job</a>
> I was Director of Technical Operations at The Clymb, which was outdoor-focused e-commerce vendor (think REI without the stores). I had a team of four and we were responsible for site devops and infrastructure. This was perfect because they were my alpha customer and I was in charge of the tech stack. The Clymb switched to Sidekiq immediately, of course, and every Sidekiq Pro feature I wrote was running in production before it was released.<p>This makes me curious about either<p>(a) conflict-of-interest rules at The Clymb that may or may not have governed the DTO directing the company to use his own separately-owned (commercial?) software.<p>(b) negotiating private ownership of software written for The Clymb.<p>One of those must have been relevant?
Mike Perham is an inspiration to me both in terms of Ruby/tech as well as business.<p>I've been using sidekiq now for almost a decade and had the pleasure to meet Mike at a Ruby conf many years ago.
It's always interesting to find out about these niche subcultures. Having worked with batch schedulers of all varieties for a couple decades, I've never run across Sidekiq but, then again, I didn't realize anyone had actually built anything in Ruby in the past decade.
I guess Matsumoto should have charged for Ruby. I'm sure Mike Perham and Derek Kraan would have been glad to pay for that and that the Ruby community would be in a strong and healthy shape.