Comment by shubhamjain
2 years ago
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Hangfire and Oban are two other background job systems which have a commercial aspect. AFAIK Hangfire has been around almost as long as Sidekiq and is still actively supported.
I'm closer to $10m than $1m in annual revenue now.
My take on Sidekiq's secret sauce: a job system is a distributed system. Most of Sidekiq's commercial features are available as OSS gems but the complexity sneaks up on you as you integrate 3-6 of those features together. Building your own almost always leads to a worse system than the mature, well-debugged system which I have curated.
Super excited of you.
- Do you have any outside hired help? I see you still have no employees, but do you contract with anyone to do customer support as an example?
- How many approx customers do you have these days? $10M revenues = 10,000 customers. Is that roughly correct, if so - wahoo, congrats.
I’m closer to 2000 customers.
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Sidekiq is special because it's crazy performant, and it _works_.
Mike has built a system that's rock solid, and he doesn't twiddle around with it willy nilly. He keeps it super stable.
The people paying for it (I'm one of those people) are paying for the reliability, in addition to the features.
Mike's also managed to find a real sweet-spot with the features he holds out for Pro/Enterprise. The stratification is just right to nudge you up, but it always feels like you're getting a good deal when you pay.
Oban is a roughly equivalent elixir library. They claim to have hundreds of customers and their cheapest plan is $500/yr, so maybe they make an order of magnitude less? Considering the relative language popularity that seems pretty good.
> I wonder what makes Sidekiq special?
Time, know-how, and long term dedication are the key ingredients from my perspective. Maybe he's working 10-20 hours now, but there's support and development every day for the past 11 years.
> 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.
I guarantee, there are background job processors in other languages making revenue.
> I guarantee, there are background job processors in other languages making revenue.
I had no idea until someone just hinted me that this was self-referential... LOL, apologies for the now-embarrassing other comment I made LOL (I only know you as "sorentwo", whoops!)
https://getoban.pro/ would like to have a word... It's apparently making good money
Funny enough, you replied to the creator of Oban.
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> I can't really outsource much of my support work because it is so technical and specialized.
Yeah, I had a Sidekiq question on StackOverflow and Mike Perham answered himself couple of days later.
In 2017, Sidekiq was generating over $1M/yr in revenue.[0] It sounds like his costs are basically nil, so he's living the dream.
[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side...
Just like the underlying platform it was built for (Rails) - it is so stupidly simple to deploy Sidekiq. Performance is great and a lot of complexity is well hidden. This makes it a great product overall.