The cheap stack: how this site is built

The whole site — including the AI agent — runs for roughly the cost of the domain. Here’s the inventory:

Piece	Service	Why
Static pages	Cloudflare Pages	Free tier, fast, easy DNS
Serverless endpoints	Cloudflare Workers	Same account, same billing
Vector search	Cloudflare Vectorize	Free tier covers a personal site
Lead capture	Cloudflare D1	SQLite-on-the-edge, free
LLM	DeepSeek (via Gateway)	~10× cheaper than frontier models
Anti-abuse	Cloudflare Turnstile	Free, drop-in CAPTCHA replacement

The interesting choice is DeepSeek instead of a frontier model. For an agent whose job is “answer factual questions about a real person, grounded in their writing,” DeepSeek-V3 is more than good enough. The cost difference matters because chat agents on personal sites get probed by bots more than read by humans.

I’ll write a longer post on the prompt design and the RAG pipeline once it’s been running long enough to have something interesting to say.