Became commercially-viable

Today is a huge milestone because Keep Track of My Games is now commercially viable. 🎉 For over 8 years Keep Track of My Games has been a totally self-funded side project that I've put hundreds of hours into. Donations have come in from generous members but it never amounted to much more than one month's hosting for a year.

Since its inception in 2011 it has been a non-commercial project due to the Terms of Use of the games API that backs the site. The API itself was free to use but restricted consumers to being commercial-free. That didn't stop some apps using the same API to enter grey areas of monetization but I stuck to passively asking for donations.

In 2019, there was a new games API startup that offered a paid service but had zero restrictions on use. The choice was clear: if I ever wanted KTOMG to earn money, I had to migrate.

After a few months and a lot of work, I was able to successfully migrate my database over to the new provider.

This means that now I can start to implement paid or premium features that my users have wanted while keeping everything that I've already built free. I haven't yet nailed down every possible way to monetize but I can finally take the time to plan out what I want to do and start turning KTOMG into a profitable side project.