Quirrel Newsletter #1 - Nibble Ahead
Tags: vercel, nextjs, javascript, react
Published: 2020-11-02 17:10:47

---
title: Quirrel Newsletter #1 - Nibble Ahead
published: true
description: The first episode of the Quirrel Newsletter - a changelog, status quo and outlook onto Quirrel developments.
tags:
  - vercel
  - nextjs
  - javascript
  - react
cover_image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-opqEahgH7r0/Tlvp3w5jAOI/AAAAAAAAD-g/VxiHSuAFqJ8/s1600/Funny+Squirrels+pictures+for+widescreen2.jpg
---

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](https://twitter.com/skn0tt). It's MIT licensed and I work in public, so [check it out](https://quirrel.dev) :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](https://docs.quirrel.dev/api-reference/next#cron-job)
- the development environment is now published [to NPM](https://www.npmjs.com/package/quirrel)
- 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](https://status.quirrel.dev)
- delays can now be specified in a human-friendly way using [`vercel/ms`](https://github.com/vercel/ms)
- I've added Telemetry
- a [new Tutorial](https://dev.to/quirrel/building-a-water-drinking-reminder-with-next-js-and-quirrel-1ckj) 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"](https://github.com/quirrel-dev/owl).
Owl is a queuing library tailor-made for Quirrel, aimed at replacing [bullmq](https://github.com/taskforcesh/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](https://twitter.com/maxfinke), [Jan Wilhelm](https://twitter.com/janbhwilhelm) and [Tim Suchanek](https://twitter.com/timsuchanek) for brainstorming with me.

From a business perspective, it's going well.
[quirrel.dev](https://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](https://twitter.com/skn0tt), 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](https://simonknott.de/articles/Fire-and-forget-HTTP-Requests.html), 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](https://twitter.com/skn0tt), 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