Owning the stack: why this site exists
For two years my personal site was a Notion workspace dressed up by Super. It looked fine. It also cost me ~$16/month, shipped a 500-pound JavaScript bundle, and meant my words lived on someone else’s servers under someone else’s terms.
That’s the opposite of what I tell founders. So I rebuilt.
The rule: own it, make it fast, pay almost nothing
This site is one small Astro repo. Pages are static HTML — zero JavaScript by default. The only script on the page is a ~20-line theme toggle. Content is plain markdown in a folder I control. Hosting is free. The domain is ~$12 a year. That’s the whole bill.
The trade I made: a little setup work now in exchange for never again being locked into a platform’s roadmap, pricing, or export limitations.
What “owned” actually buys you
- Speed as a default, not a feature you pay for. No hydration, no spinner.
- Portability. It’s markdown. I can move it anywhere in an afternoon.
- A clean machine-readable surface. I added an
llms.txtand a /agents page so crawlers and assistants get clean signal.
I believe in efficiency and the BUILD movement. A site you rent is a small ongoing tax on both. This one is mine.