A site that costs nothing to run

Free tiers get a bad reputation. They are treated as a place to prototype before moving to “real” infrastructure. That framing misses something: the constraints of a free tier are remarkably close to the constraints of good architecture.

The constraints

Cloudflare Pages will serve static files and nothing else. GitLab gives 400 CI minutes a month. Workers get a few milliseconds of CPU per request. None of that is generous, and all of it forces the same conclusion — do the work once, at build time, and serve the result.

That is the right answer regardless of budget. A page that was rendered at deploy time cannot be slow, cannot be brought down by a traffic spike, and cannot leak a database credential it never had.

What it rules out

The constraint rules out a lot, and the ruling-out is the point:

• No server-side rendering per request, so no cold starts and no runtime template errors.
• No database for content, so no migrations, no backups, and no drift between environments.
• No client-side framework, so no hydration cost and no dependency treadmill.

What remains is markdown in git, a build step, and a CDN. The interesting engineering moves to where it belongs: the editing experience, and making sure preview and production can never disagree.

The best way to make a system reliable is to give it less to do.

Where the money would have gone

A conventional version of this site would run a managed database, a container, and a CMS licence. It would cost perhaps forty euros a month, and it would be slower. The free-tier version has fewer moving parts and a smaller failure surface — that is worth more than the saving.