tonight I come defeated 💔💔 a while ago I had issues connecting with… — JJ Builds — TG.ME

tonight I come defeated 💔💔 a while ago I had issues connecting with people with similar music/movie taste as mine and had the brilliant idea (or so I thought) to make an app that would connect people with similar palettes. and as such I got to researching other apps with similar mechanisms I can use as a reference and even consulted my trusty AI, Gemini. Things were going well, even got my ideas tied down. At first the idea was to make the app get access to a user's spotify and letterboxd account (either both or just one) and base the "matching" mechanism on a similarity score using cosine similarity or jaccard index based on overlapping genres, shared top artists, and common high-rated films. the only hiccup with this was, while the spotify integration was easy through Spotify OAuth so users log in and securely grant read access to their top tracks, top artists, and saved genres, letterboxd’s official API is private/invite-only meaning i only had recent and public profile information available at my disposal. that forced me to focus on only the spotify side and that's when "RUNOUT" was born (named after the ending of a vinyl record, fitting for a music related app). I got to building and a couple months pass and I made good progress but I had to abandon the project until I honed some of my programming skills. after the UAT simulator took off more than I imagined, I decided to revisit it and finally finished and tested it. This is where the defeat happened and the biggest lesson I've learned in my journey to be a developer which is that reading the fine print is very necessary. apparently in may of 2025 spotify made a new update to their terms and regulations for app development using their app that saw new apps can only have 5 users ( including the app developer) in the development/tasting phase and requires a registered business and 250K+ monthly active users for extended quota mark. that saw the death of the runout app. If you've made it this far and want to check out the app, a live demo can be found here and if you wanna be among the 5 people to taste the app, shoot me a dm with your email so I can add you as a tester and grant you access to the app. And if you're a developer with a solution to my problem, any suggestion is welcome