I'm so tired of this pattern of "personal projects" in tech that gain a lot of recognition and adoption in communities for publishing code or an API or whatever, and then close up all the APIs/code/etc. with the excuse of "this is just a personal project and it's taking too much time", only to slam the door behind them and become an extractive commercial enterprise 6 months later, having just used those communities as their marketing launchpad without giving back
And somehow, people keep falling for this, even though the warning signs are usually there from the start, but "there's an API so it'll be fine"
Like, either your thing is a personal project or it is not. If you're running it like a tech company, it's a business, not a personal project.
Also for some reason this problem seems particularly prevalent among white dudes from Germany specifically.
And notably, these are very often 'data projects', that are built from community contributions and have become "The Database That Has Everything" so simply not using them usually also isn't really an option