Your place on the internet without expensive subscriptions.
Currently, most people pay a lot for very little.
Over recent years, the Internet has been dominated by a new business model - subscriptions. It has its advantages - without large upfront costs, you can benefit from someone else’s work. When running a business, everything is fine - you have revenue costs. However, if you want to have a blog about your hobby, a website promoting your worldview, or a low-budget startup, you’d like to reduce costs to a minimum. It’s not easy today - while you can find a domain with hosting for the first year cheaply, after a year you’ll get a bill for several dozen dollars. WordPress can be installed with one click as part of a subscription, but more interesting features require paid plugins. Email in your domain? No problem - for a few dollars a month you’ve got it (per person). The more satisfied you are with your project’s functionality, the less happy your wallet becomes. Being lighter by several hundred dollars a month doesn’t come without sacrifices for everyone. Is there no escape from this? If you like quick and convenient, unfortunately not. However, if you’d like to invest some time, you can reduce costs almost to zero, learn a lot in the process, and open the door to further project development. Ready for an adventure? Let’s begin:
AI Guide#
I won’t guide you step by step in every action. First, this article would be endless, and second, there’s no need - https://deepseek.com will answer all your questions for free. It will take some time before you understand how the artificial mind works and how to formulate questions to get the answer you’re looking for, but once you learn, you’ll gain a powerful helper like a legendary genie from a bottle. I’ll only point you in the direction of your search. There are of course other free AIs, but from open source - the only sensible direction for software development - Deepseek is currently the king.
Domain Within Reach#
As I mentioned, everyone wants to give you a domain “for free” (for a year, and then domain+hosting+ssl+email+backup…etc). If you search a bit, you’ll find other solutions. I’m not encouraging anything specific, you can search on your own, or you can use https://www.alibabacloud.com/en/domain. There you can get a domain, for example myhobby.top, for $1.69, and renewal for $4.59. Cheap? Cheap. Would you like your domain to be available worldwide without waiting for minutes? CDN https://cloudflare.com allows you to connect your registered domain for free.
Professional Email#
Once you’re with your domain on Cloudflare, you can use several interesting tools, like email forwarding. You probably already have a Google account, so you can forward emails [email protected] to [email protected]. To reply to emails from your domain, you need to add an SMTP alias to [email protected]. https://mailersend.net will help you with this. Now you can configure multiple accounts, e.g., [email protected].
Modern Software#
The most popular and easiest is WordPress. The aged veteran, however, requires significant resources to operate: hosting, paid plugins. It’s heavy and slow. You can turn your website into a Ferrari, but again with expensive plugins. You can also use alternatives. For landing pages, it’s easiest to use AI to create them. For larger tasks, there are several interesting projects like Astra, Vue, Gohugo, and others. This blog is made using https://gohugo.io. Unfortunately, familiarizing yourself with the software takes some time, but once you do, your project will shine without spending a cent:
Free Hosting#
Projects without PHP, like my Gohugo, can be hosted for free in many places with fast access: Github Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Firebase. If the project is on GitHub, moving it from one hosting to another takes minutes.
Graphics and Multimedia#
Here too, everyone has their preferences. I use a free Claude Sonnet 3.5 account for writing prompts - it does this excellently. I paste the ready prompt for generating graphics into free Google FX. This pair works great for me.
Innovation Engine#
If you want full control over the code, I recommend VSCode with Cline or its fork RooCode. You don’t even need to install VSCode - Google provides hosting. Even a cheap tablet with internet is enough to operate it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work from a phone - I tried - you can’t do anything in a reasonable time. In Cline, you connect the Deepseek API. In RooCode, you can subscribe for $10 monthly to Sonnet 3.5 in GitHub Copilot and use it without limitations. Again, it will take a while before you get comfortable with them, but then only your imagination limits you in creating 😉
Process Automation#
Posting on social media is tedious work. Fortunately, you can delegate it to machines. https://make.com will execute 1000 processes monthly for free (on one account 😉)
I hope you won’t be scared of all this new knowledge you need to acquire to continue. In the era of AI assistants, it’s not that frightening. In return, you’ll gain the freedom to express yourself without cost shackles. Worth it? Worth it.
If you like writing about topics related to my project and don’t want to delve into technological voodoo, you can contact me and post in my project. We’ll create an automation for you so your posts will appear on your social media.
