Trust me: you want to make little personal apps! But maybe don't make these mistakes while doing so.
I just stumbled upon the article titled Trust me: You don’t want to make little personal apps… especially not like that! by Ross Wintle and I'd like to share a different perspective: for technical minds and learners, for engineering souls.
I've been dabbling in code for around 20 years now and doing it professionally for over a decade, whatever I do, I always try to understand the wider perspective, both in terms of business needs and technical architecture, extending beyond my core responsibilities. I may be using mostly web technologies, but I've touched different stacks on various occasions. And I have to tell you one thing: I've never been happier than when creating a tiny little app scratching my own itch or contributing to an open source project to fix something that has been bothering me. I've created AHK and kwin scripts to manage my scratchpad apps, a tiny helper to make launching yt-dlp easy from the browser, took over an abandoned RSS reader browser extension to fix everything that has been bothering me (the only one I've released publicly, I believe it might've reached 10k daily users at the peak), created a reading list extension when Pocket closed down, an RSS aggregating service to decouple from the browser/single machine (solely because none of existing services had the right GUI and their APIs were annoying for me too) and many others. Note though most of these required no maintenance once done, only the published RSS reader extension needed to solve issues outside of my own happy path and the aggregator is basically working on its own but I keep dependencies up to date just to be sure as it's a service exposed to the public internet.
Nowadays LLMs are really helpful in making these, but I'd suggest you only use them for the personal tiny tools or when you truly understand their output. You wouldn't want to risk losing someone else's data or having your service hacked into because LLM did something sketchy you didn't catch!
Hosting your services isn't hard or expensive if you're willing to learn. There's Oracle Free Tier, keeping the powerful machine up may be challenging, but the smaller ones should be a non-issue. There's the mikr.us project of cheap VPS made for enthusiasts and learners, including their one time payment Frog (availability may vary, Frog is only for Polish residents, other services may be locked in your region due to frequent abuses), and there are many other cheap-ish options on the market, you absolutely don't need to splurge $40/mo, unless your service is truly big enough for that already, but in that case this article isn't for you.
Things start getting sketchy when you open up your service for external users or integrate external services. Liabilities will start popping up and services will change their behavior in emergency mode exactly when you have no time to upgrade your code. But these, again, I wouldn't consider tiny personal apps, these are complex systems with distributed dependencies and should be treated as such!
In conclusion: small personal apps are great and I encourage you to make them! But remember: as soon as you start being responsible for other people you need to put much more effort, even if your license says "no guarantees" your conscience wouldn't be happy knowing your app ruined someone's day or even life.