> What are some tools, libraries or services you built

I made a website builder and CMS, because the world really needed another one of those :)

> are they open-source

Not currently, but I keep wondering whether that might be a route to go down and how that may impact the ability to ever earn money with the thing. I know they are not mutually exclusive, but my main worry is that I am terrible at marketing what is (imo) a good product and I wouldn't want someone whow does know how to do marketing to take it away yet. Once I have a certain number of users I'll probably open source it. Or if no users show up, actually.

> why weren't you satisfied using what already existed

So many things.

- Most website builders rely on drag & drop blocks. Everyone loves using these, but in my experience it just leads to a jumble of blocks and components that behave erratically when asked to respond to different screen sizes. I went with 'modules' instead. Little, self-contained, (mostly) full width components that you stack on top of one another to compose a website structure out of it, this way we can control how components react to screen sizes much more tightly, making it much harder to mess up the design

- Most website builders also aren't running 60fps on my shitty Android (I'm not saying mine does at all times, but it probably does more often)

- Back in the day I just wanted to throw a quick static blog onto Netlify using the Netlify CMS, with quick, near-realtime previews of what I was doing. You could either get a sort of hacky realtime preview by injecting stylesheets into React components specifically configured for that purpose (which looked mighty impressive when it worked), or you had to wait for your git deploy to be picked up and shown as a preview, which took ages (or which feels like ages when you are iterating quickly)

- I don't like themes. They feel more restrictive than anything. I find that making large structural changes to a site is hard to do with Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress and the like. I think Wix even locks you into a theme once you've chosen one

- Hidden costs everywhere. Squarespace, Wordpress and the like are very good at making their services appear cheap and then very quickly trapping you into paying for all sorts of features. Netlify and Heroku felt similar. Like the amount Netlify charge for form handling suprised me.

- I wanted to see what my website looks like almost in realtime, and I wanted that preview to be easily shareable, so I built that

- I didn't want to think about hosting, DDoSes or anything like that, so I just deploy static sites to Cloudflare. Done.

- Documentation that covers the entire system, back to front, in both video and text. Try doing that with Squarespace or Wordpress.

- Lastly, I wanted something stupidly easy to use. Easier than any of the incumbents. It has to be so simple that complete computer illiterates would be able to develop an intuition for it in minutes. User testing I've conducted so far is telling me it's working, but I want to get more data on this

In the end I think my sites are just a little bit less pretty than the elaborate themes you can get with other providers, but they perform better, are faster, much easier to use and we try to not break the bank either. So it depends on what your needs are. I am under no illusion that I could ever rival Wordpress' or Squarespace's offerings, so I try to compete where they can't.

I must admit that pricing is something I still haven't figured out at all. My cheapest tier is (GBP) 7.99 a month. Is anyone willing to pay that nowadays? Tempted to add a free signup, with payments only coming into play once you hit 'publish' on your site.

Anyway, the thing is called the Pink Pigeon Website Builder & CMS[0]

0: https://pinkpigeon.co.uk