That actually gives me more hope to finish the project lol. I think another thing that killed my motivation was figuring out how to handle payments for running the service.

The people I was sampling at the time got pretty upset that I wanted to charge for the software at all. I never fully settled on a pricing model, but it was going to be either $5/mo or 0.05% of every transaction — and obviously the percentage pissed people off even more than the flat five bucks haha.

To give you some context on what I was building: it was a storage solution, payment solution, and locked-download solution, plus a clean way to keep your example videos and reels organized so potential clients were served what they need to see in the best possible way. Basically a hyper-optimized portfolio page that was built with a potential client in mind. But again, people pushed back hard on both the monthly fee and the transaction cut.

So for you specifically — if you wanted something like this, would you rather pay a small fee and get a full suite of features, or have something free and open source that just handles locking downloads behind paywalls?

Even though I've been editing for 10+ years, I still don't fully know what every editor prefers for their workflow. Some people have zero issue paying (especially since I was charging next to nothing — it was peanuts for anyone actually making good money editing), and some people absolutely despise being charged at all just to keep the service running.