[iloveitaly]

Sidekiq makes ~1M/year in gross revenue. I believe the only full-time employee is the founder, and it doesn't sound like there are any material recurring expenses:

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side...

It's the most profitable one-man show I know of, although there's many that I've run into that ~500k, albeit with a much higher operational burden.

[mperham]

I'm at ~$2m now. Still no employees.

[digianarchist]

Mike created a quality product that was much better than the alternatives at the time. I remember working in a Rails shop and struggling with Resque.

[iloveitaly]

Agreed. Sidekiq solves a real problem much better than the alternatives. As soon as your app starts to make real money it's worth paying for enterprise for the support + added features. I feel like there's got to be other businesses to be built by creating 'premium' open-source packages for common pain points in application development.

[stef25]

After skimming through the podcast transcript it's still not clear to me how this works.

What's the difference with say the job queue system of Laravel / Horizon / Redis ? From what I can tell this has all the same features listen on the Sidekiq page except it's free.

What am I missing?

[pkalinowski]

Sidekiq is using Redis behind the scenes. It's a job queue system for Ruby and Ruby on Rails

[stef25]

Seems to have only a few extra features compared to Laravel's Horizon (from looking at screenshots, I could be totally wrong).

https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/horizon

Horizon is free, crazy something like this could be monetized so successfully.

[herval]

For every successful product, there's at least 10 free tools that do the same thing (or something similar). It's not crazy at all - people (in particular larger companies) need support, assurances the product will still exist/be maintained in the future, etc. A lot of people will pay you just so they have a human on the other side of the line to talk to, in case things go wrong.

[pkalinowski]

Never used Sidekiq myself, but I believe its value is mainly speed and reliability. It suits systems with hundreds of thousands of jobs to process. At least that's what I read on website :)