I apologize if the tone in my comment was not the nicest.

You should know your worth as an employee. If a company asks for too much you must have the ability to stop yourself from working for an entire week with no compensation.

I wouldn’t say you’re at fault for delivering. You are at fault of not delivering a concise solution that uses least elements possible and has a nice clean fast-to-read readme, one setup script or docker file or whatever.

And tbh the result is just a solution (ignoring all the issues of is this terminal inspired and is email backend as a service acceptable choice) - looks generic, nothing interesting besides a super long proposal and super long readme to achieve nothing special honestly. Just a solution checking the boxes. Probably one of many. That’s why probably wasn’t selected.

TL;DR

1. Be more concise in messaging and documentation 2. Do something more than just the working solution esp if they mention brownie points for cool stuff in the task description