[Mavvie]

I hope my tone doesn't come across as rude or too argumentative, but I think your understanding is a bit inaccurate.

> it's under your control to find a host that doesn't have these issues

All hosts will have these issues, the only question is how often. If you need 100% consistency, then you can't use the free Sidekiq. Personally, I've never needed Sidekiq pro (as these kinds of crashes are extremely rare). But this will depend on your scale and use case.

> And not even a full-on ACID database is going to be 100% reliable if you yank the power cord at the wrong moment

This is only true if there's bugs in the DB, or some underlying disk corruption happens. The whole point of an ACID database is that they're atomic, durable, and consistent, even in the worst case scenario. If a power failure corrupted my SQL database I would feel very betrayed by the database.

[danenania]

It wouldn’t be corrupted, but in-flight transactions could fail to commit, just like queued jobs can be lost with sidekiq. The failure modes are similar.

I take your point that at a certain scale, hardware failure is inevitable, but if you’re running that many servers, you can afford sidekiq’s enterprise plan. It’s not something that will realistically happen if you’re just running like 20 instances on AWS. It’s perfectly reasonable to charge extra for something only large organizations with huge infrastructure budgets need.

[Mavvie]

For sure, I agree with you.

I would say that queued jobs being lost is different from an in-flight transaction being auto-rolled-back, but it's not a super important distinction. Like others have said, I think Sidekiq really nailed the free vs premium features and its success is evidence of that.