7 months building an open-source chess tool. Here's what actually happened.

I started this project in December 2025. Not because anyone asked. Not because I saw a gap in the market. Because I compose chess problems as a hobby and every tool I tried to export a diagram with either watermarked the output, required an account, or exported at 72 DPI like it was still 2003. So I built my own. Seven months later: 5 stars on GitHub, 6 forks, a handful of npm downloads, about $13 spent on hosting. That's the whole story, numbers-wise. Why I kept going The tool actually works. T