AI slashed my hosting bill to $0

Howdy wizards,

Today I'll take you on a short journey on how AI helped me slash my hosting bills to zero.

Earlier this year I had AI analyse my business costs and manage to reduce several bills by optimising the usage of the tools I was using.

One of the expenses that was steadily increasing was my hosting provider, Vercel. So I used AI to optimise my Vercel usage and bring the cost back to baseline.

With the release of Opus 5.5 about a month ago, I realised it's now way more feasible to just cut out certain services entirely.

I asked Claude about moving off Vercel to self-hosting my websites and apps on my VPS.

Before I get into the result of this, I need to make sure you understand what a VPS is.

A VPS is a rented computer sitting somewhere else, and it's always on. 

Mine is from a company called Hetzner and sits in a data center in Helsinki. It has 8 GB of memory.

When working with AI, having a VPS is the equivalent of having baking soda in your household. It comes in handy for so many things.

Another thing I’ve done this year that has paid off big time is organising my context better, including all the chats I have with AI. Here’s a free Chrome extension that helps you do just that:

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After you build an app or a website, the reality of the situation is you need to host that somewhere so that you may share it with the world.

That somewhere for me used to be Vercel. That's what people refer to as hosting.

It didn't take long for me to pass Vercel's free plan limits.

I started paying $20/month. Seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. Then every subsequent bill I got started getting larger.

In July it reached $50, and the bill looked totally confusing to me. A ton of line items I didn't even understand. Claude helped me optimise the usage back towards the initial monthly price.

When I asked it if we can just self-host everything, it warned me that my sites might be a little bit more prone to outages, but that my server has 99.9% uptime.

The main projects I have are this newsletter and Context Windows. Plus an array of small apps and personal projects.

I can live with 0.1% outage on those.

And for security, my sites fit comfortably on Cloudflare's free plan. It sits in front of my server and filters out bots and attacks.

So I gave Claude the green light, and it migrated everything for me overnight.

There was an outage on day one, due to a bug introduced during the move.

Claude had set up proper monitoring so I was alerted of it and then it got fixed within a minute.

It's been a month and my sites still run exactly as before.

I now pay $0/mo instead of $35/mo.

Not a huge amount, but enough to matter to me long-term. And I enjoy being self-sufficient and not at the mercy of price hikes and changing terms of different software platforms.

Moving from one service to another used to be a big and complicated job. Building your own solutions used to be unworkable.

That's not to say it's now easy peasy. I'm also in the middle of moving my email sending off beehiiv, onto a system I vibe coded. It's going well, but there's been more complexity to it than I expected. And Claude warned me about that.

But migrating to new platforms and building your own solutions is definitely easier than it ever has been. Start with simple tools, then go for more complex ones once you've seen it work.

With a bit of technical curiosity and time on your hands, you can probably vibe code what you need. Even if people on the internet, who often have something at stake, claim otherwise.

PS I'm not saying you should vibe code all your software. I still pay for tools that I think are worth it.

Last week I showed you how I’m tracking my Claude usage to reveal points of friction to make workflows more effective.

And there’s actually a tool out there that does this for agents you deploy: it studies every run and suggests fixes to make them cheaper and faster. It’s called Lagrange Cloud:

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You are a delight.