[Cymen]

I need an end goal with actual people using what I'm making to be really motivated. And having achieved that on some open source projects (one in particular with tons of usage, now deprecated), I need some kind of personal increase in value to hold my interest. Maybe that will change once I'm financially independent but I think focusing on increasing value is a good thing and value can mean different things (doesn't always have to be money but often is -- there is some value from being one of the big contributors on an open source project but, having been there, the value is typically seems to be very low even if you have 1M+ downloads).

That said, deploy, maintenance and support can be a grind. I like the challenge but your experience may vary.