I know what you mean. One of my previous projects was a homeschool tracking SaaS. Even at $5/month people were complaining about the price and I never got more than a dozen subscribers.

In the end I shut it down (while keeping an instance running on a home server for my own use) because it was barely breaking even and wasn't worth the headache.

I am poor therefore I write my own software.

I don't understand down votes.

I often will see the price of an API (cough Google maps) and roll my own solution.

An independent developer capable of making a replacement for the entire Google maps API on their own probably isn’t likely to remain poor for long.

Creating an API isn't that hard. Crafting system architecture to handle a reasonable amount of load isn't that hard nowadays either.

But where the heck am I supposed to get all the data?

> But where the heck am I supposed to get all the data?

That’s exactly my point. Making a full replacement for an API (endpoint) is much more than writing some swagger.

openstreetmap in this example!