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Comment by iloveitaly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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