Is this really necessary given the advances with SQLite in Rails 8? What edge does this have over what’s included these days?

Very good question, I don't know. Ideally you'd stick with the most vanilla stack, being solid queue, etc. However after trying solid queue in my production environment with Postgres I was left very disappointed at the reliability and speed. This could've been some misconfiguration on my part though.

Another thing that I noticed is that if you compare litestack's benchmarks to solid_cable (for example) litestack claims to outperform redis whereas the argument for solid_queue is that it is slower, but worth the simplicity of 'just using the database': https://github.com/rails/solid_cable?tab=readme-ov-file

All in all I would prefer 'the standard' solution, but I am interested in experimenting with litestack. After all that is what side projects are perfect for.

Litestack provides numerous benefits, but the largest is live replication to S3-compatible storage, which SQLite will not do by default.

Are you confusing it with Litestream, the backup solution? https://litestream.io

What they meant was https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack which has a lot of things built on top of sqlite, like job queue and caches. Rails 8 now comes with most of them out of the box.

My SaaS ran on litestack until rails 8 came out, then I switched without problems.

Ahh, yeah you’re right. My bad. Litestream was what I was thinking of.