HN user
When it seems like the mountain is impossible to climb and it's overwhelming I just look for the next small thing to fix/implement and get it done. Rinse and repeat. Don't think about the bigger picture, just get stuff done. Eventually a lot of stuff gets done and you make progress.
I had the same issue and was considering setting up my own tileserver. Fortunately I found www.tracestrack.com. Much less expensive that other options I considered and service has been good so far.
Anyone know if it is possible to mitigate the impact of Hetzner blocking UDP traffic on port 9000+? These outages whacked our Kubernetes clusters (Calico + vxlan + Wireguard). https://serverfault.com/questions/1100482/how-to-limit-udp-p...
Building a niche Strava-like platform can be done.
I started https://intervals.icu about 3 years ago to scratch a cycling itch and learn Vue.js. It has evolved into an analysis and planning tool for all sports. I have avoided segments because I get data from Strava (and Garmin/Suunto/Polar etc.) and that is very much their bread and butter.
Intervals.icu suddenly got popular about 18 months or so ago and I had to decide to drop it or spend my whole vacation doing devops work. It also started to cost real money to run. So I started a Patreon and then implemented Stripe. Lots of people have been nice enough to signup for the optional subscription (tx guys!). But I will probably add premium features in future to encourage more signups.
It is a lot of work! Large amounts of data to process and store and lots of support (have to put less bugs in the platform!). My next steps are to make this not just me.
Intervals.icu has an open API and a number of apps already integrate with it.
The Strava API is pretty much dead. They aren't giving out any rate limit increases so whatever you build using it can never progress.