Four Years of WriteDaily: What Keeps a Side Project Alive

WriteDaily turned four this spring. It’s processed over 40,000 writing sessions, never lost a word, and continues to serve a small group of daily writers. It also generates no revenue and has no growth strategy. I wrote about the first year and second year in more detail — this post is about what keeps the project alive, not what it produces.

By startup metrics, it’s a failure. By side project metrics, it’s one of the best things I’ve built.

What Keeps It Alive

The Tool I Use Myself

I write 750 words every morning on WriteDaily. I’ve done so for over four years. The product exists because I want it to exist for me. Every user beyond myself is a bonus — but the project doesn’t depend on them to survive.

This is the single biggest factor in its longevity. If I stopped using WriteDaily, I’d stop maintaining it. As long as I write daily, the tool stays alive — a point I first made in the launch post and one that’s held true every year since.

Low Maintenance Surface

WriteDaily’s infrastructure is intentionally minimal:

One server, one database, no CDN, no queue workers, no microservices
No billing system to maintain
No user-generated public content to moderate
No API integrations that can break

The operational burden is a few hours a month. Most of that is server updates and dependency patches.

No Revenue Means No Obligation

This sounds backwards, but charging money creates obligations. Users who pay expect support, uptime SLAs, feature roadmaps. WriteDaily has none of that. The relationship is simple: I build and maintain a tool I use. Others are welcome to use it too.

What I’d Tell Someone Starting a Side Project

Build something you need. The best guarantee of maintenance is self-interest.
Keep the scope cruel. Every feature you add is a feature you’ll maintain forever.
Resist monetisation unless you’re ready for the obligations it brings.
Track something. The session count, word totals, and streak data keep the project interesting to me as a builder, not just a user.
Let it be small. Not everything needs to grow.

WriteDaily at writedaily.co is exactly the size it needs to be. Four years in, that still feels right.