How We Built a Custom Website for $0/Month Hosting

We wrote a shorter version of this story in our post about moving our website to Cloudflare. That covered the "what" and "why." This post goes deeper into the "how" — the exact stack, the role AI played, and the real performance and cost numbers.

The short version: we replaced a WordPress setup that was costing over $1,200 a year — hosting, form plugins, PDF add-ons, SEO tools, security, backups — with a custom-built website that loads in under a second, scores 95–100 on Google PageSpeed, and costs literally nothing to host. The only ongoing expenses are domain registration and email — about $136 a year combined.

Here's exactly how we did it.

The stack

Our website runs on four things. All free. All open-source or free-tier.

• Astro — a static site generator that turns templates into pure HTML. No JavaScript ships to the browser unless you explicitly ask for it. The output is just HTML and CSS — the fastest thing a browser can render.
• Tailwind CSS — a utility-first CSS framework. Instead of writing bloated stylesheets, you apply small, composable classes directly in the markup. The build step strips out anything unused, so you only ship the CSS your pages actually need.
• GitHub — version control and the deployment trigger. Every time we push code to the main branch, the site rebuilds and deploys automatically. No FTP. No manual uploads. No "which version is live?"
• Cloudflare Pages — free hosting on Cloudflare's global CDN. Your site is cached on servers in 300+ cities worldwide. Automatic SSL. Automatic builds from GitHub. The free tier handles 500 builds per month and unlimited bandwidth — far more than any small business website needs.

That's it. No server to manage. No database. No WordPress updates at 2am. No plugin vulnerabilities. Just static HTML files served from the closest edge node to whoever's loading the page.

How AI built the entire site in one afternoon

We're an AI company, so yes — we used our own tools. But the point isn't that we're technical. The point is that AI has made website development accessible to anyone who can describe what they want in plain English.

We used Claude to build the site. The process looked like this:

1. Described the site structure. Homepage, solutions pages, about page, contact page, blog. Claude scaffolded the entire project — directory structure, layouts, components, navigation — in one pass.
2. Defined the design. Dark background, gold accents, clean typography, professional but not corporate. Claude generated a full design system: colour palette, spacing, typography scale, component styles.
3. Wrote the content. We provided the key points for each page. Claude expanded them into full copy that matched our voice — conversational, direct, no jargon.
4. Handled SEO. Meta titles, descriptions, Open Graph tags for social sharing, Schema.org structured data, XML sitemap, robots.txt — all generated automatically for every page.
5. Deployed. Connected the GitHub repository to Cloudflare Pages. Every push to the main branch triggers a build. The site goes live in under 60 seconds.

Total time from "let's rebuild the website" to a live, fully functional site: about 4 hours. Most of that was reviewing content and making decisions about what to include — not writing code.

No web developer was hired. No design agency was briefed. No one sat in a drag-and-drop editor dragging boxes around for three weeks.

Performance: the numbers

This is where the difference is stark. WordPress themes, Squarespace, and Wix all ship a huge amount of JavaScript, tracking scripts, and framework overhead with every page. Our site ships almost none.

Why does this matter? Because Google has been explicit: page speed is a ranking factor. Core Web Vitals — the metrics Google uses to measure real-world user experience — directly influence where your site appears in search results. A site scoring 95+ will outrank a functionally identical site scoring 60, all else being equal.

And beyond SEO, there's the user experience. When someone searches for your business on their phone and your site loads instantly, they stay. When it takes 4 seconds, nearly half of them leave before the page even renders. That's not a theory — it's Google's own research.

Cost: the three-year comparison

We wrote about this in our breakdown of what AI tools really cost. But here's the website-specific comparison over three years:

That's $408 versus $828–3,795 over three years. And our site is faster, more customisable, and fully owned by us. Note: the Squarespace and Wix figures don’t include third-party form tools, which you’d still need for anything beyond a basic contact form.

The savings aren't life-changing on their own — it's not like swapping out a $2,000/month SaaS stack. But it's free money. You're paying for worse performance. Why would you keep doing that?

What you give up

We're not going to pretend there's no trade-off. There is.

With Squarespace or Wix, you get a drag-and-drop editor. You click, you type, you see the result. It's simple. It works. If you never want to think about code, HTML, or deployment pipelines — a page builder is fine. Use Squarespace. We mean that genuinely.

With our approach, there's no visual editor. Changes happen in code. You need to be comfortable with a text editor and a terminal, or you need someone (or some AI) that is.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

• Adding a blog post: Create a new .astro file, write the content in HTML, push to GitHub. The site rebuilds automatically. Takes about 5 minutes.
• Updating contact info: Open the relevant file, change the text, push. Live in under 60 seconds.
• Adding a new page: Copy an existing page as a template, modify the content, add a link in the navigation. Push. Done.
• Changing the design: Update the Tailwind classes or the global stylesheet. Every page updates immediately on the next build.

And here's the thing — AI can do all of this. Every task listed above is something Claude can handle with a single prompt. "Add a blog post about X." "Update the phone number on the contact page." "Add a new service to the solutions page." AI reads the code, makes the change, and deploys it. The site becomes something you manage through conversation, not through a clunky editor.

Who this is for

This approach is ideal for:

• Businesses that want maximum performance. If you care about SEO, load times, and Core Web Vitals, a static site on Cloudflare Pages is hard to beat.
• Businesses that want ownership. Your site lives in a GitHub repository that you control. No platform lock-in. No "stop paying and your site disappears."
• Businesses with brochure sites. If your website is a handful of pages that describe what you do, plus a contact form and maybe a blog — you don't need to be paying hundreds a year in hosting and plugins.
• Anyone already using AI tools. If you're using Claude or similar AI for other parts of your business, your website becomes just another thing AI manages for you.

Who this is NOT for

Let's be honest about that too.

• People who want zero technical involvement. If you want to drag and drop and never see a line of code, use Squarespace. It's a good product for that use case.
• E-commerce sites. If you're selling products online and need a shopping cart, inventory management, and payment processing — you need Shopify or WooCommerce, not a static site.
• Web apps with user accounts. If your "website" is actually a web application with logins, dashboards, and real-time data — that's a different conversation entirely.

For most small businesses though — practices, trades, professional services, consultancies — a fast static site is all you need. And it should cost you nothing to host.

The workflow: push and forget

Once it's set up, the deployment workflow is beautifully simple:

1. Make a change to the code (or ask AI to make it)
2. Push to GitHub
3. Cloudflare Pages detects the push, runs the Astro build, and deploys the new version
4. The site is live globally in under 60 seconds

No logging into a hosting dashboard. No clicking "publish." No wondering whether the staging version matches the live version. There's one source of truth — the GitHub repository — and everything flows from it automatically.

If something breaks (it hasn't yet), Cloudflare keeps the previous version live until the new build succeeds. You can roll back to any previous deployment with a single click. Try doing that on WordPress without a backup plugin.

Get started

If you're paying monthly fees for a website that rarely changes, you're overpaying for something that should be free. The performance is worse. The flexibility is worse. And you don't own it.

We've done this for our own business and we can do it for yours. AI builds the site, Cloudflare hosts it for free, and you get a faster, cheaper, fully custom result.

Want to see how your current website stacks up? Get a free website audit — we'll show you your performance scores, SEO gaps, and hosting costs. No strings attached.