Knackpot is four evenings a month. Site hosting needs to cost 0 SEK — neither in money nor mental load.
Three options were on the list: Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages. All three handle a static Astro build with no fuss, all three auto-deploy from GitHub. The decision came down to what was already in the same place.
What tipped it to Cloudflare:
1. DNS, HTTPS, redirects and mail in one dashboard. The Cloudflare zone handles everything. When knackpot.se needed nameserver switching, DMARC and a www → apex redirect, it was three clicks in the same view instead of three vendors.
2. Email Routing is enough. niklas@knackpot.se → Gmail, no need to pay for a mailbox. Catch-all so nothing is lost if someone misspells. Free.
3. The free tier covers the whole journey. 500 builds per month, unlimited bandwidth. The site builds in ~2 min; we use maybe 5 min per month.
What I didn’t think I’d need but got for free: an AI Crawler Control toggle in the dashboard that lets me decide whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended may read the content. For a studio that wants to be cited in AI answers it mattered to turn the block off. (Default was “block everything”; I only noticed when an audit flagged Disallow: / for every AI bot in robots.txt.)
Trade-offs I accept:
- Cloudflare Pages doesn’t build as fast as Vercel (~2 min vs ~30 s)
- Astro needs the
@astrojs/cloudflareadapter — unnecessary for a fully static site, but works - Build logs in the dashboard are less readable than Vercel’s
The site you’re reading this on: six self-hosted font variants (~50 kB), fully static, ~2 min deploys, $0/month.
— Niklas