What happens when your Rails app is stuck on an outdated version? You may know it needs to be upgraded, but the work feels overwhelming, risky, and no one on your team really wants to take it on. 

That’s where FastRuby comes in.

For the past eight years, FastRuby has carved out a unique (and much-needed) niche in the Ruby ecosystem: helping companies upgrade their Rails apps safely and sustainably. Founded by Ernesto Tagwerker, FastRuby has worked with clients like SoundCloud and Power Home Remodeling, and completed more than 100 projects, with over 50,000 developer hours invested in upgrades alone.

“Early on, we did an upgrade for Power Home Remodeling,” Ernesto explained. “We finally had one client who was excited to work with us on this very specific problem. And we thought, okay, this is great validation that there is something there.”

So why does keeping Rails apps up to date really matter?

“The number one problem is security,” Ernesto said. “There are a lot of security issues that have been discovered, and not all of them are backported to really old versions. If you’re running Rails 4.2 in production, there are known security holes in that codebase, and you’re increasing the chances of someone exploiting it.”

The other cost of staying on old versions is losing momentum and even increased churn on your engineering team. “You will find it harder to ship features over time because you’re working with an old version of the framework,” he said. “And nobody wants to be working with Rails 4.2 or Ruby 2.6. Engineers want to be working with the latest versions.”

However, despite these risks, making timely Rails upgrades is a common problem. “If you don’t make it a goal every month to upgrade some of the dependencies you have, you can kind of forget about it,” says Ernesto. 

The FastRuby team steps in to offer a structured path forward, taking on the work of upgrading their client’s apps while also teaching the team strategies to help them stay modern over time. “We train their engineers to know what to do and how to upgrade without a ton of risk.”

A big part of what sets FastRuby apart is their commitment to open source. While the company reserves some internal tools for client work, they open source about 90% of the tooling they create.

Their team maintains and contributes to a variety of upgrade and quality-focused tools, including NextRails, RubyCritic, Skunk, and RailsBump.org. 

“We love to share with the community all the things we do in articles about how to upgrade,” Ernesto said. “And open source is part of our marketing strategy. If we open source the tooling that we use, we have something to write about, to talk about, to present at conferences, and that helps people find us.”

That philosophy has helped FastRuby grow from a one-person business to a company of 25 people, including 15 engineers. “We were about six people for a long time,” Ernesto said. “Then eventually, when we productized this service and created FastRuby.io, that helped us scale.”

But growth for growth’s sake isn’t the goal. “Quality is the main thing we care about,” Ernesto emphasized. “We don’t want to grow to 100 engineers and sacrifice quality.”

Looking ahead, the team is focused on expanding its reach to startups and small teams. “We came up with this idea of a fixed-cost monthly maintenance service,” Ernesto shared. “We work with a lot of clients who are just one person doing everything. And they now know they can add our team at a fractional cost without breaking the bank.”

Of course, like many others in the industry, FastRuby is also thinking about the impact of AI. “In the next six months, the work is not going to be delivered 100% by humans,” Ernesto said. “So we’re going to have to figure out how to shift our pricing model from hours to value.”

Through all of this, Ruby and Rails remains at the center of FastRuby’s work. “Rails is a great framework to build something really quickly with,” Ernesto said. “The story of the one-person framework is real.”

In addition to their client work and open source projects, FastRuby is an active supporter of the Ruby community, sponsoring open source projects like Hanami, the Philly.rb Meetup, and even RailsConf!

At RailsConf 2025, the FastRuby team will be on-site at Hack Spaces area on day two, ready to pair with attendees and answer questions. And Ernesto has this advice for newcomers: “Just come, find a friendly face and say hi! You’re going to see that maintainers are friendlier than you think. We’re happy to help you learn more about the tools we’ve built and work with you on improving them.”

By sharing about their work, sponsoring open source projects and events, and engaging in places like Hack Spaces, FastRuby is putting in the work to keep the Rails ecosystem modern and welcoming.

And by helping companies upgrade their apps and mentoring their teams along the way, they are doing the kind of work that, while not flashy, is absolutely essential.

For the teams who’ve been quietly running Rails 4.2 in production for far too long, it’s exactly the kind of help they’ve been waiting for.