Hello everyone, Simon from Quirrel here!
Its my pleasure to present you the first issue of the Quirrel Newsletter.
The Newsletter won't be published on a strict schedule, but rather as I see fit.
It covers all things Quirrel: Improvements to the tool itself, interesting stories from Quirrel users, insights into the business of a bootstrapped MicroSaaS and lots more.
Let's get into it, shall we? :D
Quirrel, if you haven't heard about it, is a job queueing solution for serverless deployments, developed by me. It's MIT licensed and I work in public, so check it out :D
What's happened in the last weeks
In true changelog manner, let me start by giving you an overview of the developments of the last weeks:
- Quirrel now supports cron jobs
- the development environment is now published to NPM
- the onboarding experience has been improved
- the client now features JSDoc comments for improved DX
- you can now see the status of Quirrel infrastructure on the status page
- delays can now be specified in a human-friendly way using
vercel/ms - I've added Telemetry
- a new Tutorial has been published
As you can see, a lot of work has been done, making Quirrel even more useful.
One of the more future-facing efforts I started is called "Owl".
Owl is a queuing library tailor-made for Quirrel, aimed at replacing bullmq.
It will make Quirrel more performant and remove the need to run Redis during development (that means no more Docker for you Next.js developers 🎉).
The past weeks have also been accompanied by a lot of wonderful interactions with Quirrel users.
I don't have space to list all of them, but I'd especially like to thank Max Finke, Jan Wilhelm and Tim Suchanek for brainstorming with me.
From a business perspective, it's going well.
quirrel.dev (the hosted Quirrel instance) currently has 53 registered users across four continents, and a handful of them have even deployed an application using it.
There's one paying customer, putting Quirrel at a MRR of 10$.
Not much, I know - but considering Quirrel is a 2-months-old product that's in full development, it's quite a good start.
The State of Quirrel
"Where are we, in the Quirrel journey?"
The answer to that question determines what I should focus on:
If the product is done, I should focus on promoting it and growing its userbase.
If it's in development or emerging, doing the opposite would be wise: Collaborate with existing users to improve the product, but don't expand yet (to prevent churn).
At the moment, Quirrel is definitely in development.
While I'm kind of satisfied with its features, I still need to find out more about the way people use Quirrel and their individual needs.
So if you use Quirrel, I'd love to hear from you! Drop a comment or leave me a DM on Twitter, I won't bite 😇
Once I'm confident that I achieved "product market fit", I'll ramp up the Quirrel media presence and bring more users onboard.
Outlook
So now that we know about the Status Quo, let's take a look ahead.
There's a couple of upcoming changes I'm planning to make:
By the end of the week, Quirrel will transition to Owl. This will enable Quirrel users to run the local development version of Quirrel without having to run Redis.
I'm also experimenting with Fire-and-forget HTTP requests, which has the potential to substantially improve throughput on large Quirrel instances.
This change will be made once the performance improvements become necessary.
Quirrel.dev will also see a slight change to its pricing model. The current 20$/month plan costs the same, wether you make 500 or 10.000 calls.
This strongly favours high-usage projects for no apparent reason.
I'm currently thinking about introducing a pay-per-use model with a lower base fee and additional charges based on usage, which is a model that multiple users have already suggested.
Last, but not least, let's talk about client libraries.
While at the moment, I'm talking about Quirrel as the job queueing solution for Next.js, it will be equally useful for other frameworks in the future.
I'm currently planning on creating integrations for Redwood, Sapper, Nuxt and Express. Which framework would you like to see a client library for?
Thanks for reading!
If you've made it this far, that shows quite some dedication.
I'd like to emphasise on what I wrote earlier:
If you use Quirrel (and even if you don't), I'd love to hear from you! Drop a comment or leave me a DM on Twitter, I won't bite 😇
Anyway, I hope this Newsletter was interesting to you. What new stuff did you learn about Quirrel? Let me know :D
Have a great week,
Simon
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