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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

True. Especially when I build something that solves one of my own problems. I think it's great and maybe others would like it too.

Then I discover that amongst all of humanity, I have problems which are absolutely unique and shared by no one else, anywhere.

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Don't be so hard on yourself. Someone else somewhere probably does have each problem that you have.

But finding them is prohibitively costly.

And they're poor.

I am poor therefore I write my own software.

I don't understand down votes.

I often will see the price of an API (cough Google maps) and roll my own solution.

An independent developer capable of making a replacement for the entire Google maps API on their own probably isn’t likely to remain poor for long.

Creating an API isn't that hard. Crafting system architecture to handle a reasonable amount of load isn't that hard nowadays either.

But where the heck am I supposed to get all the data?

> But where the heck am I supposed to get all the data?

That’s exactly my point. Making a full replacement for an API (endpoint) is much more than writing some swagger.

openstreetmap in this example!

I know what you mean. One of my previous projects was a homeschool tracking SaaS. Even at $5/month people were complaining about the price and I never got more than a dozen subscribers.

In the end I shut it down (while keeping an instance running on a home server for my own use) because it was barely breaking even and wasn't worth the headache.

I was going to post the same thing. I guess we all have unique problems. Then there's the opposite, that everyone else have a problem, that you do not have, and thus you can not see the value of your solution. People have to literally throw money at you for you to understand they are actually willing to pay for something so simple as a hadron collider.

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