Don't let them underpay you. Fuck that yearly review shit. Get what you're worth, my guy, please. Not doing so
devalues the work.
Is this expectation wise? Does your employer know? Are you prepared to make moves should this not come to fruition?
You're forgetting to factor in skill, expertise, efficiency, and other factors that go into determining pay-by-merit. It's nice to be grateful for what you have, but are you selling yourself short?
It's empowering to update your résumé, apply to a few job ads on the market, and perhaps even have some tentative offers. Helps assess one's worth in the immediate area's market and gives one confidence before negotiating for a higher salary.
Just saying. 
I appreciate the advice. My yearly review is a couple of weeks away and is the time when we sit down to talk about what we want of each other so that's why I'm waiting for it. I waited before because before I started this project, I have no experience or knowledge in full stack programming at all, I met with the president of the company to propose my ideas, and he said he loved the ideas, and promoted me to developer, and sad let's see what you can do. So I taught myself the necessary skills and until I presented it to him, for all he knew, I was just talking a big game. Now that he knows, I have bargaining power. If my yearly review was months away, I might not wait, but it's a couple of weeks away.
I am prepared to make moves if they decline to pay me more. I just really, really doubt they will, especially if I actually put in my 2 weeks after being declined. Like I said, they'd be pretty solidly fucked, for a while, if I left. I also really don't want to, and it would be a hard decision to make even if I had to, because like I said, I love where I work, the intangible benefits are huge, and also the company is rapidly growing. And for their part, the rapid growth will be unsustainable without my work. Furthermore, I haven't completed my platform yet, so it's not like they can just say "well we got what we wanted out of him, he can walk, that's fine". Another reason I am confident they will agree to it. I say it is my expectation because I am not being delusional when I say they need me and that they'd be screwed without me. I am the only person in the company who has the ability to do the level of coding that I do, or even close. I work for a market research company, we have clients come to us with what they want to find out about XX market, or about some product or theirs, or about how to determine which from among various potential new products will perform the best in the market, etc. We are known in the industry for be able to provide anything they ask for, of any level of complexity. So we have a lot of clients who want us to do very complicated things, and all of those things need to be able to be accomplished in a timely manner. My job for 15 years here was programming the online surveys that gather the data, then we have marketing sciences people who do the analysis and interpretation of that data. We have a team of survey programmers who I used to have the same title as, until recently, but for many years I have been the guy who figures out how to actually make things happen in the surveys that haven't been done before. All the other "programmers" are more copy and paste sort of people, with little understanding of why the things they are copying and pasting work, let alone how to come up with a way to do something new. The field is full of people like that, the "real" coders tend to go into industries that make better use of their skills.
For example, we have a new client who came to us because they heard we can create simulated menu ordering exercises with a rough simulation of their online menu, with a point and click interface that simulates what it's like to order a meal at their online menu. Nobody in the company has even the slightest inkling how to make that happen except me. The only other properly trained coder in the company only knows back end stuff and is absolutely wretched at front end, and understands nothing about how our survey platform works, and he literally only does database stuff (he's better than I am at that), and Perl (which to him is hand down the best programming language to do any and all tasks in and always will be), and limited javascript/jquery and CSS. Examples like this happen literally every week and without me they would have to turn down a large percentage of the work coming in, or outsource it every time. Plus a bunch of the tools and apps that are used widely throughout the company are ones I developed over the years, and again, no one else has the understanding to be able to do the upkeep and troubleshooting and periodic updates on those except me.
If the company weren't specifically looking to finally be moving into modern times, I would just want to go somewhere else anyway. But recently since we became privately owned again, leadership has been looking to build out our internal development team again. My work the past year or so has been the beginning of that. The president and the executive vice president keep leaning on the CEO to make him realize I need a team, and they think they're getting close. My work now is application development which finally is something that suits my skills and is something I really enjoy. And I have been directly told that I am in the inner circle now and that they have a lot of plans for me and that there is a lot of upward mobility left for me here. So it seems silly to throw that away now, even though yes, I should already be making more money than I do now. But I have good reasons for thinking that if I apply some pressure and state what I need now, I will get it, and also that it will pay off for me to stay here.
I probably spent too much time on this reply but I feel like you're insinuating that I'm being naive or something, but I don't believe I am, I've thought about this a lot and I know my value to this company, and so do they. I just haven't had the opportunity to show my full skills until recently. I did almost leave a few times because there was an 8 year period where the multinational corporation that owned us was bleeding us dry and prohibiting raises and bonuses and also prohibiting us from building our own development team, instead they required that any development resources be outsourced to another company they owned. Fortunately, when they tried to dissolve us, our CEO said fuck you, and bought the company himself, and since then was when I got promoted, and a raise, and now we're growing by leaps and bounds. Through that whole period, yeah I could have jumped companies a few times and I could have been making way more than I am by now, but what can I say, I believed in this company and wanted to work here. Money isn't everything. Quality of life trumps money for me. That said, now that they actually have the ability to make decisions about money again, I do expect them to reward me for what I'm bringing to the table, since I am bringing a lot more to the table than I was.
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), or like x, xx, xxx, etc. And absolutely no indentation, ever. Fortunately he retired and I took over his role and have tried to hammer proper coding practice into them, with only small successes.
unbelievable
It also means that the time draws near when I can sit down with them and say "okay, now you've seen that what I said I could do, I can do... now give me what I deserve to be paid". Which is 6 figures. People are making 150k for the type of stuff I'm doing. Granted, I taught myself the necessary skills along the way. But we have a lot of plans for expanding this for use throughout the whole organization, which is going to be a lot of work for me. 
