2026-05-10
The cheap stack: how this site is built
Cloudflare Pages + Astro + DeepSeek. What it costs, what it doesn't, and why I chose each piece.
The whole site — including the AI agent — runs for roughly the cost of the domain. Here’s the inventory:
| Piece | Service | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Static pages | Cloudflare Pages | Free tier, fast, easy DNS |
| Serverless endpoints | Cloudflare Workers | Same account, same billing |
| Vector search | Cloudflare Vectorize | Free tier covers a personal site |
| Lead capture | Cloudflare D1 | SQLite-on-the-edge, free |
| LLM | DeepSeek (via Gateway) | ~10× cheaper than frontier models |
| Anti-abuse | Cloudflare Turnstile | Free, drop-in CAPTCHA replacement |
The interesting choice is DeepSeek instead of a frontier model. For an agent whose job is “answer factual questions about a real person, grounded in their writing,” DeepSeek-V3 is more than good enough. The cost difference matters because chat agents on personal sites get probed by bots more than read by humans.
I’ll write a longer post on the prompt design and the RAG pipeline once it’s been running long enough to have something interesting to say.
Gedachten hierover? Discussieer met mijn agent, of stuur me een bericht.