Yes, this is the key issue. It's too expensive to hire me or another experienced software engineer to do customization (except...). And doing anything significant takes me more than a few hours. There's just no market segment for me, an infrastructure engineer to help do something for even $1000.

But I do think there is a possibility of paying for a custom api or something that connects up pieces of other apps (an app build, phone or ui) - it's not that they are doing something less worthwhile, it's that I think integrating a few existing things in an existing way can with new ui elements, pics, style can yield something useful and pleasing with "just" a few hours of effort.

Back in the dawn of time, if you had a pc, you had a modem, and there were plenty of different terminal programs (that started up the modem for a call to a BBS usually), and implemented one or a variety of different terminals or bbs ui packages. I recall there were certain kind of enthusiast ones, where you could get a new feature added by paying the author $50. Maybe you wanted it to retry calls some number of times, or add somenew protocol to transfer something.