A major roadblock I find is that when you want to release your side project and start charging for it, I feel it becomes much harder to make changes after. This

A major roadblock I find is that when you want to release your side project and start charging for it, I feel it becomes much harder to make changes after. This means you get caught in a loop of trying to polish it more and more before biting the bullet and releasing it. If you change the interface a lot or how features work, you'll annoy users that don't like the change and you'll have to be extra careful not to introduce any bugs. If users can save data, the new version will have to work with the old data format. If you want to move features from a free version to the paid version you'll annoy users. So to me, releasing a MVP you charge for that might change a lot later might lead to more headaches than developing the idea further. Are there ways around this? Side projects you release for free are one thing but when you want to charge for them the amount of polish and attention to detail you have to pay to marketing jumps by an order of magnitude. People will tolerate bugs and rough edges for free projects but not for paid ones. I agree with the advice about not wasting time with CI, switching frameworks etc. though.