A whole site for the price of a domain

This site costs exactly what the domain costs. Nothing else. It is not a promotion or a temporary trick: it is what fits in Cloudflare’s free tier if you accept building inside its limits.

What is in there

• Static hosting served from the edge, with no request ceiling that matters at our size.
• One Worker resolving the few dynamic routes: the language-based root redirect and the suggestions API.
• D1, a managed SQLite database, for suggestions, votes and leaderboards.
• Turnstile to stop bots without a captcha or a consent banner.
• Cookieless analytics, which removes the cookie notice entirely.
• A preview deployment per pull request, each with its own URL.

The small print

It is not magic, and there are three things worth knowing before copying it:

1. You are tied to one provider. All of this lives on Cloudflare. We consider that a reasonable trade because the content is Markdown in the repository and the site is static: moving the hosting is hours, not months. The only thing genuinely tied is D1, which is why we keep exportable backups.

2. Limits exist even when you cannot see them. D1 has daily read and write quotas. They are plenty for a suggestions board, but do not build something on top that writes on every visit.

3. The cost is not money, it is attention. Wiring up bindings, migrations and secrets has a learning curve. If your alternative is a €5/month host you already know, the saving may not be worth it to you.

Why it fits us

Because the failure mode we most want to avoid is not the bill: it is abandonment. A site with no recurring cost and nothing that expires stays up even if nobody touches it for a year. With a paid server, the day nobody renews the card, everything goes down.

There are three of us and we are not paid for this. Designing to survive our own loss of interest is not pessimism, it is realism.