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.