J
Judoscale
👤 Adam McCrea (Rails dev who built it to fix his own employer's Heroku bill — real pain, a real test app, and permission to keep the code.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
An autoscaler that grew by sitting in Heroku's add-on marketplace, not by marketing.
Will it work? · our read
Distribution won. Five years of passive marketplace growth, then Heroku faded and he had to rebuild the channel on Render, Railway, Fly.io and ECS. No figure disclosed since 2021.
01How the money moves
Dev installs the add-on from Heroku, Render or Railway
→
Agent watches queue time and scales workers up or down
→
Monthly plan billed by dyno count, $20 to $2950
02The numbers
$300,000 ARRStatedfounder-stated, 2021
2021
Plan ladder read live off the pricing table; tiers are priced by dyno count. judoscale.com/pricing
Zero to $26k MRR in three years, all through the Heroku add-on marketplace. No figure disclosed since.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
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Startups For the Rest of Us #556 — founder interview; page prints "$300,000 in ARR", "$26k MRR" and the Heroku alpha/beta gates.FounderQuest transcript — "The Heroku add on marketplace has just been fantastic"; first full-time hire named.Judoscale pricing — live plan ladder, free White Belt through $2950/mo.TinySeed portfolio — lists Judoscale as a portfolio company.The Ruby Gems Podcast, Sep 2025 — "powering thousands of apps", "(mostly) bootstrapped".
Revenue is STATED, not filed: Adam McCrea said $300,000 ARR on Startups For the Rest of Us #556, and the page still prints both "$300,000 in ARR" and "$26k MRR" in its title. I confirmed those strings in the raw HTML, not in a search snippet. The figure is from 2021 and is the last one he has published — treat it as a floor, not as current revenue. Judoscale has since hired, added Render, Railway, Fly.io and ECS, and a Sep 2025 podcast describes it as "powering thousands of apps", but no dollar figure accompanies that. Pricing tiles were read from the live pricing page's raw bytes ($20/mo, $2950/mo). Two things I could not verify: a Dec 2024 LinkedIn post titled "Some fun Judoscale stats to end the year" sits behind LinkedIn's authwall, so I make no claim about what is in it; and a widely repeated "$120K from TinySeed" figure appears only in secondary summaries, so it is omitted. Rival weights are our read of reach, not measured share. No drama here: Heroku shipping a competing autoscaler was the one real threat, and by his own account it did not materially hurt. We never score you.