I know there is in no way that you meant any offense to your question at all. And just as you should, this is a great question you asked. "Why did you do it? What compelled you to spent however many hours on this project?"

While most of us SaaS developers dream of making it big, with thousand of people paying just $2 or $5 a month -- I know, small dreams, but just to have that validation is pretty amazing. Whether we are giving it away for free or for money and having people use it... do construction workers keep a portfolio of all of the buildings they ever worked on or do they just show up for the paycheck?

Anyways, point is... sometimes we do things for practice, learning, and experience.

I'm not the author of NotePin but I could certainly answer that question, and it comes down to: why are people still starting blogs in 2020? Why do I keep my blog going after 7 years? Three reasons: Perspective. POV. Experience.

I created https://mypost.io in 2015. Very first project I ever made. I took a free course online at Stanford University to learn about databases. While the teacher was a nice lady, she was boring. How do you make anything about relational databases fun to learn? I took a test.. really just didn't understand what it was asking, and so, after a few sessions, and even googling it... I still couldn't figure it out.

MyPost would be the foundation for everything I'd learn about PHP and MySQL databases.

Once I got my hands on it.. I started looking at PHP's built-in SQLi function and then discovered a few database frameworks that assisted in making life even easier. At the time I built MyPost, support for PHP 5.6 was ending. Here I was.. just got done building my very first project... about to release it to the public, and PHP 5.6 support was ending. So I had to make a choice... and I updated to PHP 7.x, and everything was broken. So I had to relearn some PHP and make the code compatible with everything I had already done. I'm very happy I spent the next month on it upgrading the code and it did teach me a lot.

Of course, I did monetize the blogging platform as well to keep it going. When I had it free, I had Russian hackers completely dominate it and use it to spread millions of dark web urls. The traffic was awesome... millions of people visiting.

Until I got hit with that DCMA... I spent a few hours deleting the damage they did, which were hundreds of thousands of posts added to the database in as little as 24 hours. I deleted them. More popped up.

Once I added the paywall of just $12 for a year to use the service, unlimited posts. I still had people signing up and paying for it, but the "Russian hackers" completely disappeared, off to use another service they can exploit.

We all develop our own web apps with our own visions. 99% of the time, someone else built it already. But no one built it with the vision you had. And that makes us human with the billions of thoughts and ideas that we have throughout our lives. Some of us read, write, develop, build, create... just to get our "dream vision" out there into the world.

I used to be a gamer. Sitting on my computer for no less than 10 hours a day, battling on MMOPRGs or single player games.. loved 'em. Not something I was really sharing with the world and not something that really satisifed the seratonin levels of excitement. However, when I'm coming up with the creative process of design, development, and functionality... get everything working, send it out, and people start to use it, or adopt it as their everyday tool... that is a far better feeling than any video game ever gave me. Maybe I'm stupid, maybe I'm just a natural-born programmer trying to share gifts with the world.

So.. it's this guy's take on a notepad or editing tool. Pretty cool :)