Build vs Buy
Open Source software is great, why should you pay money for Sidekiq Pro or Enterprise when you can build it yourself?
A senior developer is typically $10,000/mo or more. The price of Sidekiq Pro is roughly $85/mo and Sidekiq Enterprise starts at $229/mo. Is your business building infrastructure or user functionality? How many days or weeks will it take your team to piece together similar functionality? How long will they spend fixing bugs in production? Paying money for good infrastructure means you have more time to focus on user-facing features.
Baremetrics has a Build vs Buy calculator. Here's some extremely optimistic projections, now let the numbers speak for themselves:
Sidekiq Pro and Enterprise have lots of really valuable, well-documented, well-tested functionality. You can reproduce some of this functionality with 3rd party open source libraries but:
- Will they be supported years from now?
- Will they work with newer Sidekiq versions?
- Will they get a steady stream of updates to fix bugs?
- How many days or weeks will it take you to integrate everything together and test it?
All of the Sidekiq Pro and Enterprise functionality is designed to integrate and work well together. You can spend days or weeks integrating various OSS gems or you can pay me for more features and have it running in minutes.
From Jonas Chevalier, pusher.com:
Just wanted to say how great Sidekiq [Enterprise] is. It's refreshing to see a software that has been well thought out, handles all the corner cases and is solid. We're actually saving money with the Enterprise plan because clockwork is now gone. Also Sidekiq is so simple to integrate compared to the hacky solutions we had before. It's harder to calculate but we spent a couple of weeks figuring out all of this, vs two days for the Sidekiq Enterprise integration. I expect maintenance to also be cheaper so it will also work out over time nicely.
You can scale your Rails application easily with background jobs. At that point Sidekiq is a major piece of your business's infrastructure so a dedicated support policy becomes insurance: three years from now, after many on your engineering team have moved on, who will help you if a problem suddenly develops? It's very common for issues to OSS projects to linger for weeks or months. During business hours, I typically respond to emails and issues within hours.
Upgrades months or years from now are as simple as bundle up sidekiq-pro. The upgrade path between major versions is always well documented. So why pay? Because it's my business to make your life as simple and easy as possible.
Buy Sidekiq Pro or Sidekiq Enterprise.