Case studies·Tools

Sidekiq

Open-core Ruby jobs — Redis, not a platform team

Mike Perham built Sidekiq as a better Resque, kept the core free, and sold Pro/Enterprise add-ons. The product is Redis plus Ruby gems — no Kubernetes brochure — and the business grew from beer money to seven figures on word of mouth.

2012

Better Resque, LGPL, $50 licenses nobody bought

Side project · 33 commercial licenses for $1,650 (first 9 months)

Perham was frustrated with barely maintained Resque on every Rails app he touched. Sidekiq shipped in February 2012 as a threaded Ruby background-job runner backed by Redis — simpler and faster than the status quo.

His first monetization experiment was a $50 commercial license for teams that hated LGPL. In nine months he sold 33 copies. At ~300 hours of work, that was below minimum wage. He documented the failure openly on his blog.

Lesson

A license swap is not a business model. Fix the incentive structure before you burn out maintaining free software.

2012–2014

Sidekiq Pro turns OSS into a paycheck

~$10k/month Pro sales (~18 months in) · quit day job mid-2014

In October 2012 he pivoted to open core: Sidekiq stayed free; Sidekiq Pro added batching, reliability, and enterprise-friendly features for $500–$1,000 per company. No ads, no growth hacks — just documentation mentions and conference hallway conversations.

Pro sales climbed to about $10k/month within 18 months. By summer 2014 he went full-time on Contributed Systems. Sidekiq Enterprise followed in 2015 as a higher tier for bigger Ruby shops.

Lesson

Charge for the features big companies need, keep the core excellent for everyone else. Rubyists will pay when you save them thousands a month.

2015–today

Still Redis-shaped, revenue keeps compounding

~$2.9M ARR (2024 public reports) · approaching ~$10M/yr sales (2025 resume)

Sidekiq became the default background-job stack for Ruby — thousands of Pro/Enterprise customers, billions of jobs processed, still fundamentally a gem talking to Redis. Perham’s 2025 resume cites ~2,000 customers and annual sales approaching $10M with no employees listed.

The infrastructure story never graduated to microservices cosplay. The business model did: sustainable OSS maintenance funded by high-trust, high-price commercial tiers instead of consulting or support-plan grift.

Lesson

Your “platform” can be Redis and a well-maintained gem. The hard part is saying no to features that explode support burden.

Sources

Facts drawn from public engineering posts and interviews. Numbers are approximate where sources disagree — we're stack advisors, not historians.

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