S
Sidekiq
👤 Mike Perham (He'd hand-built job queues at every Ruby shop he worked at — so he knew the exact pain, and the community already trusted his OSS.)🌐 sitemikeperham.comGitHub
Resque was memory-hungry, so Perham built a threaded queue, gave it away, then sold the parts big shops need.
Will it work? · our read
Solo and durable. A free tool the whole Ruby world runs, a paid tier the biggest shops can't skip, and one person keeps the margin. Hard to displace from inside its own ecosystem.
01How the money moves
Free OSS Sidekiq becomes the Ruby default
→
Scaling shops need Pro/Enterprise features
→
They pay $995/yr Pro or $269+/mo Enterprise
02The numbers
$13.5M totalEstimate10-yr gross sales, solo
2022-01-17source:
"$13.5 million in total gross sales" — cumulative over 10 years, per Perham's 10th-birthday post
All three self-reported by the founder on Sidekiq's 10th birthday (Jan 2022). The $13.5M is cumulative gross sales, not annual. Perham blog, 2022
1,850 customers. One employee — him.
🔒
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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Happy 10th Birthday, Sidekiq (Perham, 2022) — "1850 customers", "$13.5 million in total gross sales", "1 employee (me!)"sidekiq.org — pricing: OSS free, Pro $99/mo or $995/yr, Enterprise from $269/mo per 100 threads; used by Adobe, Netflix, Heroku, Gusto.How to make $100k in OSS by working hard (2013) — Perham on turning Sidekiq OSS into paid Pro.github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq — the open-source project (13.6k stars): "Simple, efficient background processing for Ruby", maintained by Mike Perham.
Revenue is STATED, first-party: Mike Perham's own post 'Happy 10th Birthday, Sidekiq' (17 Jan 2022) prints '1850 customers', '$13.5 million in total gross sales' and '1 employee (me!)'. Read the period carefully — the $13.5M is CUMULATIVE gross sales over 10 years, NOT annual revenue; treat it as a lifetime floor, since the current annual run-rate is not publicly disclosed. Two independent WebFetch reads of that page returned identical figures. Pricing is from sidekiq.org (fetched Jul 2026). No FILED figure exists — Contrib Systems LLC is private. No drama: Sidekiq won on timing (multi-threaded when the Ruby community adopted thread-safety) and a decade of patient solo execution. Perham still ships solo in 2026 (Sidekiq 8.0, 2025), so 'one employee' appears to hold — but that is our read from his ongoing posts, not a 2026 headcount statement. We never score you.