Why this site runs on a free tier, and why that's the whole point

This site is Astro-generated static HTML on Cloudflare Pages. It costs $0/month and there is nothing to patch, scale, or get paged about.

That’s not an accident and it’s not frugality. Most of my infrastructure costs $0 a month. Not because I’m cheap, but because the constraint makes me a better engineer. When you can’t throw a bigger server at a problem, you have to actually understand it.

Here is the entire hosting bill for what you are reading:

❯ cat /etc/infra/costs | grep site
this site    Astro static · Cloudflare Pages    $0.00/mo

Everything I write about here runs somewhere I can show you: a hypervisor I have broken more times than I have admitted in public, a handful of services behind a Cloudflare Tunnel with zero open ports, three ISPs feeding all of it. The blog follows the same rule the systems do: if it can be static, it’s static; if a free tier covers it, the free tier wins.

What goes here from now on: production systems, infrastructure, and what actually breaks. The next one is the homelab network: three ISPs, four routers, and the overlapping subnets that made all of it look like a DNS problem.