From $100/Month AWS to Free: Building a Custom Website in an Afternoon

For months, my analytics agents have been nudging me about the same thing: "You need a web presence beyond YouTube." They weren't wrong. Better SEO, a place to host supplementary content like infographics and research notes, maybe a simple blog—it all made sense.

The problem? I was already paying around $100 a month for an EC2 instance and related AWS services. For what amounted to basic web hosting. The actual video content lives on YouTube and Spotify anyway, so spinning up a full server felt increasingly absurd for serving some static pages.

I started researching alternatives. WordPress? Maybe. Some other CMS? Possibly. I asked Claude for the most economical path forward.

The answer surprised me: just build it from scratch.

A year ago, building this type of integrated CMS from scratch wouldn't have been an option. Way too much work for a solo creator. But yesterday, Claude Opus took care of it for me in a few hours of iterations. What a world.

Now I have a simple static site generator woven directly into my content production system. New episodes automatically get their own pages. The about section, a page explaining how the system works, blog posts—all of it flows through the same pipeline. The hosting? Cloudflare Pages. Cost: zero dollars.

When I produce a new episode, it's already part of the website workflow. No manual uploads, no separate CMS to wrangle, no monthly AWS bill haunting my inbox.

Sometimes the best solution isn't the most sophisticated one. It's the one that fits seamlessly into what you're already doing—and doesn't cost a hundred bucks a month to keep the lights on.