The Workflow
This week I fixed a font-loading regression on the site you’re reading right now, on a stack that still hasn’t cost me a dollar to run.
I don’t write the code. Astro, GitHub, and Cloudflare do the technical work; I describe what the site needs to do and Claude figures out how. This week that meant catching a scary-looking performance alert, tracing it before touching anything, and fixing the one real thing that was actually wrong. Ten minutes, once we found it.
What Broke
The Cloudflare adapter I use for the site quietly dropped support for a feature I was relying on, mid-project. It broke my plan to run a weekly automated email as part of the main site build. The fix was standing up a second, separate piece of infrastructure just to keep that one job alive.
Free-tier hosting means someone else’s platform change becomes your fire drill. Nobody puts that part in the pitch.
Time Ledger
$0/mo hosting. That’s the whole ledger this week — no agency retainer, no server bill, nothing.
The Prompt File
Hand this to your own AI to scaffold a free-hosted site from scratch.
I want to build and host a professional one-page (or small) website for my business, and I want it to cost nothing to run every month. Act as my web developer.
Here's what I need from you:
1. Ask me clarifying questions first — what my business does, who the site is for, what action I want visitors to take, and any pages/sections I need (e.g. home, about, contact, services).
2. Once you understand the goal, choose a modern, lightweight site framework and a free hosting platform with git-based deploys (so pushing a code change publishes the site automatically). Tell me what you picked and why in one or two sentences — I don't need to understand the tech, just trust the choice.
3. Set it up so my content and design live in a code repository you and I both have access to, and connect it to free hosting so there's no server to manage and no hosting bill.
4. Build the site to be fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to update — from here on, I should be able to describe a change in plain English ("update the headline," "add a testimonials section") and you make the edit and redeploy it, without me touching code.
5. Once the first version is live, walk me through connecting my own domain name if I have one, and tell me the one command or step I'll use going forward whenever I want something changed.
Keep explanations in plain language — I want to direct the site, not maintain the stack myself.Manager’s View
What would it cost your team, in dollars and headcount, to stand up and maintain a site like this in-house? Would “zero dollars a month” ever be the answer?
Field Notes
- Cloudflare’s weekly performance report flagged a scary 503% jump this week. I checked it before touching anything. Turned out to be a statistical artifact of visits jumping from 10 to 220 in a week, not a real regression.
- Running on free infrastructure means someone else’s changes become your fire drills. Nobody puts that in the “free hosting” pitch.