I really enjoy programming. It’s my biggest asset as a developer that after a long day of working on ASP.NET websites I work on PHP websites to relax. As a result I have a lot of personal programming projects.
Every personal project is for myself or my friends and I develop specifically for that market. Eventually I stop working on the project and move onto something else as my interests change. I also tend to never bother trying to make money on these projects because I expect them to fizzle out.
And then something gets pretty big…
For KSheet, I never expected it to get as popular as it is. When I pulled from the market it was over 10k downloads. I can’t help but think that if I charged just $1 for it, I wouldn’t have to worry about my 12 year old car dying on me. I’ve gotten a handful of donations, which has been awesome and charging for an app would have brought down the number of downloads but regardless it’s still a wasted opportunity.
That said, KSheet taught me that the market exists for good DnD apps so I might get back into it with KSheet 2.0. The next version won’t be totally free though.