How I Set Up This Website
/The whole build, in the order that makes each step cheaper than the last, with the exact thing to say to Claude at every stage. You will not type any code. Domain, static site, newsletter, store, gate, deploy.
Somebody emails me about this every week now, and I’ve been answering it one email at a time like an idiot, so here’s the whole thing written down once.
Start with the three that will actually cost you a customer, because if you close this tab in ninety seconds these are the ones I’d want you to have taken:
Start the email list today. Not after the store. Not when the site looks right. Today.
When you build the thing that gives people access, build the thing that takes it back in the same sitting. Same afternoon, same file, or it never gets written.
Click your own buy button, with your own card, before every single time you put the site live. Reading the code is not the same and I’ll show you what that cost me.
Everything else on this page is recoverable. Those three are where the person who pays is somebody who trusted you.
You are not going to type any of this
Neither did I.
I’m not a good coder and never have been. And I wasn’t going to hand somebody two thousand dollars to build it for me, which is about what the going rate still is.
Let me be straight with you about that number, because I’m in this business and I could just let you believe it. Two thousand dollars is a scam now. Not in 2019 it wasn’t. In 2019 somebody had to sit there and write every line, and that was a real skill you were paying a real person for. That gate is gone. A machine writes the files now, and anybody still charging you like it doesn’t is charging you for a wall that isn’t standing anymore. They’re counting on you not knowing that. I’d rather you knew.
I’m not writing this for people with a marketing budget. Those folks are fine, they’ll hire somebody and it’ll be lovely. I’m writing it for the guy running a crew out of a truck, the one who cuts hair or fixes cars or cleans houses and needs a real site on the internet and has never once had two thousand spare dollars sitting around. That person got told for fifteen years that the web was above their pay grade, which was a lie back when somebody still had to hand-write every line, and it’s a much lazier lie now that nobody does.
The money isn’t even the whole of it. What comes back for your two grand is somebody else’s reading of your brief, and the thing in your head was always more specific than anything you managed to write down. You get a nice site. You don’t get yours.
So I used the machine. Same one you’re about to use. You install Claude Code, point it at what you want in plain English, and it builds the files, runs them, and tells you what it did. The part of this that used to be a career is now a conversation, and that is an enormous thing to have happened.
It took about a month. Not a year, a month, and I can show you the receipts because the first commit on this thing is dated the thirty-first of May and the whole network was standing by the end of June. Everything since has been running it, which is a different job. So when somebody quotes you eight weeks and four thousand dollars, understand that the eight weeks is not where the work is either.
So why does the order below still matter? Because the machine will build the wrong thing beautifully. It’ll do it fast and it’ll sound confident while it does. It cannot want anything on your behalf, which means knowing what to ask for is the entire job now, and that’s the part nobody hands you.
The other thing it can’t do is tell you the truth about whether it worked. Not because it lies. Because it’s reporting on what it meant to do, which is exactly the trap I fell into reading my own code three times in a row.
Get set up first. Install Claude Code. Make one folder for the site. Start the machine inside that folder and never work anywhere else. When something goes sideways, and it will, “delete the folder and start over” stays a real option that costs you an afternoon instead of a week.
You don’t need to know what a repository is. You need to know the folder is the site and the folder is yours.
Now the part that will save you the most money on this whole page, and almost nobody tells you.
There are two ways to pay for Claude Code and they are not close. You can put in an API key and pay per token, or you can run it on a regular Claude subscription, flat rate. Use the subscription.
On the API you pay by the token, and right now that’s five dollars per million going in and twenty-five per million coming back. Sounds like nothing until you watch what a coding agent actually does: it reads whole files, writes whole files, reads them again to check its work, and does that over and over for hours. A single afternoon of real building moves a lot of tokens. People wire up an API key because it’s the first option they find, then get a bill that makes them quit.
The subscription is twenty a month and Claude Code is included. Same machine, flat rate.
What I’d actually do: pay the hundred for one month of Max, use it to get the whole build done while you have the headroom, then drop to the twenty-dollar plan afterward. Or skip that and just go slower on the regular plan, which works fine and is what you’ll be on long-term anyway. Either way, don’t put a credit card on the API.
Cost: twenty a month on the regular plan, Claude Code included. A hundred for one month of Max if you want to get it built fast.
The check: ask it what files are in this folder right now. Look at the folder yourself. If it’s confidently describing something you’re not looking at, stop and fix that before you build one thing on top of it.
Static first, and decide it now
Static means your site is a folder of finished pages. Somebody visits, the server hands them a file, done. No database, no software running, no login page for anybody to attack, because there’s no login. Nothing to patch at two in the morning because a plugin you forgot about turned out to be a door.
The other kind runs code on every single visit, which means a machine with real muscle under it, a database feeding that machine, and a patch schedule you swear you’ll keep right up until about week three. And the whole apparatus bills you by how much of it gets used. So your costs go up with your traffic. The exact month your work finally lands is the month somebody mails you a bigger bill for the privilege of it landing.
Read that again. You’d be signing up to get punished for winning.
Static flips who pays. The work happens once, on your laptop, before anybody shows up. Then ten people visit, or ten thousand, and the machine on the other end does the exact same amount of work either way, which is none.
I’m not neutral here. I ran the other way for years and tearing it out was the best week of work I’ve ever done. So here’s where it sucks: static is useless for anything live and user-made. Comments as they’re typed, a real forum, a dashboard that changes per visitor. You bolt those on later as separate little services, which is what I did, and it’s more work than a platform that hands them to you on day one. Fine. Everything else, which is damn near everything, is better.
Say this: I want a static site. Explain in plain English what that means for what I can and can’t do, and don’t let me pick a content management system unless I’ve asked for the same thing twice.
Cost: nothing. It’s a decision, not a purchase, and it’s free today and expensive on day two hundred.
What the easy ones actually cost
Here it is on one line each, taken off their own pricing pages today.
| headline price | the catch | |
|---|---|---|
| Ghost Starter | $18/mo | 1,000 members, and exactly one of you |
| Ghost Publisher | $29/mo | still 1,000 members. The $11 buys staff seats |
| Ghost Business | $199/mo | the rung you hit at 1,001 members |
| Wix Light | $17.77/mo | billed yearly. 2 GB. Monthly costs ~50% more |
| Wix Business | $39.77/mo | billed yearly |
| Squarespace Starter | annual only to get the rate | 2% of everything you sell, on top |
| WordPress | “free” | hosting + plugin licenses + patching it forever |
| this | $0 to build | a domain, and about $20/mo once the list is real |
Every builder quotes you a number that isn’t the number. I went and looked at all of them so you don’t have to take my word for any of this.
The price on the page is the pay-a-year-upfront price. Wix advertises “save 50%” for annual billing, Squarespace says “up to 36%.” Read that backwards, which is the honest direction: choose to pay monthly, like a person with a normal cash flow, and it costs half again to twice as much. The number that got you in the door assumes you handed over twelve months before you’d built anything.
Squarespace takes a cut of your sales on the cheap plan. Starter charges 2% on everything you sell, on top of the subscription, on top of what the card processor already took. Sell four thousand dollars of anything and that’s eighty bucks, for nothing, to the company already billing you monthly for the page it happened on.
Ghost is the one that made me actually angry, and the trap is in the tier list. Starter runs $18 a month for 1,000 members. Publisher runs $29 a month for, and I want you to sit with this, 1,000 members. Eleven extra dollars every month and not one additional subscriber. What you bought was staff seats, which you do not need, because you are one person.
Then you hit 1,001 people. Not ten thousand. One thousand and one, which is a good Tuesday, and the next rung is $199 a month. From twenty-nine to a hundred and ninety-nine because a thousand and one humans decided to read you. That’s not a price, it’s a toll booth that appears the exact moment the thing starts working, and every one of these companies builds one, because the whole business model is waiting for you to succeed and then billing you for it.
And WordPress won’t rank, which is the part that actually costs you
The money is the small problem. The big one is that nobody finds the site.
Google uses page experience as a ranking input, and the thing it measures is how fast the page actually paints and settles for a real person on a real phone. A stock WordPress install is already running code and hitting a database on every single visit before it can send you a byte. Then a theme goes on top. Then a page builder, because you didn’t want to write HTML, and that builder ships its whole stylesheet and its whole JavaScript bundle to every visitor whether the page uses it or not. Then a slider plugin, a forms plugin, a cookie plugin, an SEO plugin whose main job is telling you your SEO is bad. Each one adds requests. None of them remove any.
So you end up with a page that takes seconds to become usable, and you are competing against pages that take a fraction of one. The irony is thick: people install a plugin called an SEO plugin onto a stack whose architecture is the thing hurting them, and then wonder why the traffic never comes.
Don’t take my word for it, because you can check mine in thirty seconds. Run PageSpeed Insights on this site. Then run it on any WordPress site built with a page builder. The last time I measured this one it was 100 on desktop and 92 on mobile, and there is no clever trick behind that number. There is just nothing to load. A static page has no database call to wait on, no plugin stylesheets to fetch, no builder bundle. The server hands over a file that was finished before you arrived.
That is the whole reason step zero says static first. Not because it’s pure. Because being findable is worth more than every feature you were promised.
WordPress is free the way a puppy is free. The software costs nothing and then you need hosting, and the plugin that does the thing you need has a yearly license, and the one that makes it fast has another, and now it’s running code on every visit so it needs patching forever, and one day you’ll be reading a security advisory at eleven at night about a plugin you installed in 2024 and forgot. I ran it for years. I’m not going to tell you it can’t work. I’m telling you the tax is real and it’s mostly paid in evenings.
And here’s the part that outlives all the pricing: twelve months in you’ve spent the money and you own a login. Stop paying any of them and the site goes dark, because it was never yours. The whole argument for doing it the hard way is that the thing you build stays built.
“Just self-host it, then”
This is what somebody in a forum tells you the second you complain about the pricing, and it sounds like the obvious escape. It’s a different bill with your evenings stapled to it.
Take Ghost, since it’s the one with the $199 rung. Self-host it and you have not escaped the money. You need a server, which is a monthly charge. You need a database. And you still need somebody to physically send the newsletter, because a machine in a rack has no reputation with the mail providers and everything it sends lands in spam. Ghost’s own documentation says it plainly: Mailgun is optional for transactional email and required for bulk mail. So you self-hosted to get out from under one vendor and immediately signed up with another one, on top of the server, on top of now being the guy who owns all of it.
And you are now the guy who owns all of it. Security updates. Backups that you have actually tested, not backups you assume are running. The database. The certificate. The upgrade that breaks the theme. Nobody to call, because the whole point was not paying anybody.
I’ll give you mine, since I’d rather you learn it off my bill than yours. I had a scheduled job on my own setup fail silently for twenty-eight nights. Not crash. Fail. Every night it woke up, ran, wrote a line in its log saying it ran, and produced nothing at all, and every morning that log looked like a job doing its job. Nothing arrived for a month and every indicator I owned said it had. That’s self-hosting. Not hard exactly, just yours, permanently, including the parts that don’t announce themselves.
The reason a static site is different is not that I’m tougher than you. It’s that there’s nothing running. No database to corrupt, no software to patch, no service to go down at two in the morning. A folder of files does not have a bad night.
How they keep you
Read the exit before you read the price. Every one of these is easy to walk into and the walking out is where the design effort went.
Wix, in their own support documentation: it is not possible to export your blog posts to another platform. Not difficult, not lossy. Not possible. And you can’t take the site itself anywhere either, because it’s built on their proprietary system and only runs on their servers. Whatever you make there, you make there permanently, and the only way out is to retype it.
Squarespace hands you a free domain with an annual plan, which is a lovely gift right up until you notice who the registrar is. Your address is now inside the account you’re trying to leave.
Substack won’t release your paying subscribers. You can export the email list. You cannot take the billing relationship, so leaving means asking every paying reader to go re-enter a card somewhere else, and some meaningful fraction of them won’t, and that number is the whole reason the policy exists. I wrote that up properly in Own Your Platform.
None of this is a conspiracy and I’m not going to pretend it is. It’s just what you build when your business depends on the leaving being expensive. Which is why the test I’d apply to anything before you put a year of work into it is stupidly simple:
Can you get everything out, today, in a format something else can read? Not “do they have an export button.” Go press it, right now, before you need it. Open what comes out. If what lands on your desk is your actual work in a form another machine can read, they’re honest. If it’s a spreadsheet of titles, a zip full of nothing, or a support article explaining why you’d never want to leave, you already know what you’ve got.
1. Own the land
Buy the domain. Put the files somewhere you can walk away from.
The domain is the only piece of this that’s yours in the legal sense, and it’s the cheapest thing in the whole operation. Ten to fifteen a year. Buy it before you have a plan, before you have a name you love, because a name you love plus a domain somebody else is squatting on is just heartache with a receipt.
Keep the domain and the hosting at two different companies. If one of them decides you’re a problem, you want the other one still answering the phone.
Say this: I bought NAME.COM. Set up a free static host and connect the domain. Walk me through it one step at a time and stop after each one so I can tell you it worked.
That last clause isn’t manners. A machine that does nine things and reports success has handed you one fact to check instead of nine.
Cost: the domain, and that’s it. Static files at the traffic a one-person operation does are free, and they stay free a long way past the point where you’d be pleased with your numbers.
The check: type your domain into a phone that’s never seen it, on cell data, not your wifi. If your own machine is the only place it works, it doesn’t work.
2. Stand up the spine
One folder. One site generator. And the rule that outranks both: content is data, never hand-built pages.
Your store page doesn’t hold a card for every product. It holds a loop that reads a list and builds the cards. Your archive doesn’t hold a link per post. It reads the folder. Change a price in ONE file and it changes in the store, in the search index, in the sitemap, in the structured data the search engines read, and in the three other places you’d forgotten that number ever showed up.
The first time it happens it’s genuinely unsettling. You add one row and the thing appears in five places, and you stop maintaining a pile of pages and start running a machine.
A machine that builds from data will publish a lie across six hundred pages as cheerfully as it publishes the truth. Before I had a spine, I pasted the footer into every file by hand. Changed it once, and twenty-nine pages still had the old one. That cost a week of hunting, on and off, and the particular misery of never being sure you’d found the last one, which is worse than the work itself. The rule that came out of it isn’t a tool, it’s a taste: the day you paste the same block into a second file is the day the thing has started to rot. Not the thirtieth. The second.
Say this: Set up an Eleventy site here. Content as data files, not hand-built pages. Build me one page that reads a list from a file and prints it, so I can watch the loop work. Explain what you made like I’ve never seen code.
Cost: a weekend to learn, and then it never stops paying.
The check: change one value in one data file yourself. Rebuild. Then search the built output for the OLD value. Still in there anywhere? Then your page isn’t reading your data, you’ve got two sources of truth, and you don’t know it yet.
3. Light the email list, and pay for it
Today. Before the store, before you have anything worth buying, before you feel ready, which you ain’t gonna.
Every reader who finds you between right now and the day you finally do this is gone. They read the thing on a phone in a checkout line, they liked it, they meant to come back, they closed the tab. And that’s the whole relationship. There is nothing on this earth that puts your work in front of that person a second time.
An email list is the only audience you can reach without asking permission. No ranking, no algorithm deciding today isn’t your day. You write, it arrives.
Four pieces, and you own all four.
The domain, which you already bought. Your mail goes out signed as you, from an address nobody can revoke.
The list itself, which is a file. Addresses, signup dates, maybe a tag. That’s the asset and everything else is plumbing around it. You keep your own copy on your own drive, exported on a schedule. Can’t open your full list as a plain file right now, today? Then you don’t own it, you’re renting it back from whoever’s holding it.
The sender. Mail has to physically leave the building, and you do not want to run that yourself. That’s a war against spam filters that never ends. You rent the trucks, not the warehouse: a transactional email service ships your mail, you prove the domain is yours with a few DNS records, and the truck company stays swappable because the domain doing the signing is yours.
I use Resend, and I’ll tell you why and where it bites. Right now it’s the best thing going for a setup this shape: you point your domain at it with a few DNS records, mail goes out signed as you, and it gets where it’s going. Free covers 3,000 emails a month. Read the other number though, because it’s the one that gets people: 100 a day. Get past a hundred readers and a single send blows through that, so the day your list crosses a hundred is the day you’re on the paid plan, which is $20 a month for fifty thousand. I just told you to check everybody else’s limits, so there’s mine.
The other reason it’s on this page: Claude connects to it without a fight, so you can hand the whole job over. Say set up Resend for my domain and wire the subscribe form to it and you’re watching, not typing.
And in two years it might not be the best one. That’s fine, and it’s the entire reason this step is built the way it is. The domain doing the signing is yours, so switching senders is an afternoon of DNS records and nobody has to know it happened. You rent the truck. You keep the address.
The archive. Every issue is also a page on your own site. Almost everybody skips this and it’s the one that compounds, because on your own domain every issue is a real page that gets found for years.
The free option is free because it takes a cut of you instead. Substack takes 10% of every paid subscription, forever, holds your payouts 45 days, forced everybody onto Apple’s additional 30% for iOS subscriptions in 2025, and will not let you export your paying subscribers. You can take the email list. You cannot take the billing relationship. That’s the lock, and I wrote out how that trap is built in Own Your Platform.
Your own rail costs about twenty dollars a month once you’re past a few thousand sends, and it’s free below that. Flat. Not a percentage, not forever, and no percentage of anything you ever sell.
So yes, this part costs money, and it’s the best money in the whole build. Do the arithmetic on the day you have a hundred people paying you five dollars a month: one road takes fifty of it every month and won’t let you leave, and the other takes twenty and holds the door open. That gap only gets wider, and it’s already open on day one, because on day one you own a file you can carry out of the building.
Say this: Add a subscribe form that posts to Resend. Set up the DNS so mail sends from my own domain. And write every address to a plain file in this folder too, so I own the list even if I leave. Show me that file after the first test signup.
That last sentence is the entire reason to say any of this to a machine instead of clicking a button on somebody’s dashboard.
Cost: free until it isn’t, then about twenty a month. Cheaper than the readers you lose waiting, and a fraction of what the free option charges you.
The check: export the list. Open the file. If you can’t get plain addresses out in under five minutes, you don’t have a list. You have an account.
4. Wire the checkout
Never handle a credit card number. Not once, not as a learning exercise, not ever.
Use a processor-hosted checkout, meaning the customer leaves for a page the payment company runs, pays there, comes back. The card never touches your machine. That’s not caution, that’s the difference between a bad afternoon and an event that ends the operation.
When money arrives, the processor sends your server a receipt. Two rules about it, and both are how people lose money they already made.
Verify the signature and trust nothing else. Not the amount in the URL, not what the browser says, not a page that says it succeeded.
Build the claw-back in the same sitting as the grant, and build it for every way somebody leaves. The code that hands somebody access the second they pay is about thirty lines and it feels fantastic to write, because you sit there and watch money turn into a working door. The code that takes it back feels like nothing, so it gets built narrow or it doesn’t get built.
Mine got built narrow, and that’s the part worth stealing. I did write the claw-back. I wrote it for refunds, because a refund is what you picture when you imagine somebody leaving. Then people cancel instead, which is the far more common way they go, and there was no path for it. The door stayed open. You will build the reversal for the case you thought of and miss the one you didn’t, so write down every way a person stops being a customer before you write any of it: refund, cancel, chargeback, expire, get blocked. Then handle all five.
Say this: Wire up a processor-hosted checkout. The card never touches my server. Verify the signed receipt server-side and trust nothing else. Write the grant and the revocation in the same change, and make the revocation handle refunds, cancellations and chargebacks, not just refunds. Show me all of it before you do anything.
Ask for the grant on its own and you will get the grant on its own. Because that’s what you asked for.
On where to sell, two honest answers depending on what you’re selling.
If it’s purely digital, use Gumroad. Yes they take a cut. You get a lot of ecommerce back for it: the checkout, the file delivery, the tax handling, the refunds, the fraud. Every one of those is a thing you’d otherwise build and then maintain, and the cut is the cheapest employee you will ever hire. That’s where my own catalog is and I’m not embarrassed about it.
Or wire Stripe up yourself with Claude, which is easier than it sounds. Point it at a Stripe account, tell it what you’re selling, and it wires the products and the checkout in. You keep more of the money and you don’t have to understand a billion things you were never going to need. Say this: connect my Stripe account and wire in my products with a hosted checkout.
The percentage argument only matters once you have a catalog and real volume. Before that, pick whichever one gets you selling this week.
Cost: a percentage when you sell, nothing when you don’t, which is the honest way to pay for something.
The check: buy your own product. Real card, real money, real price. Then refund yourself and confirm the access actually went away.
I read my own checkout code three separate times hunting a bug that was sitting in plain sight on the rendered page. The third time I clicked the button instead and found it in five seconds. The code is a story about what the page will do. The page is the page.
5. The gate, if you need one
Blocking a member worked exactly as designed, which is how it got me.
Block somebody and their tier, their space, their access all end on the spot. Correct, instant, complete. And nothing anywhere cancelled their subscription. The row kept the subscription id and the customer id, the renewal kept renewing, and a payment came in every month from a person who had no access to anything. No alert on my side. No notice on theirs. It just sits there being wrong until it turns into a chargeback and a story about me that I’d deserve.
Nobody wrote in about it. That’s the part I want you to hold onto: the failure was silent in both directions, so not hearing complaints was never evidence it worked. Skip this section unless you’re selling access to something ongoing. Most people should. This is the expensive one.
A membership answers three questions and nothing else. Who is this. What did they pay for. May they see this page. Every membership platform on the market is wrapping those three questions and charging a percentage forever for the wrapping, and for a lot of people that’s the right buy. It isn’t a scam. Just know what you’re buying.
Sign-in should be a magic link. Type your email, get a link, click it, you’re in. No passwords. That’s a real improvement and it isn’t free: it moves your whole risk surface onto an email inbox, so the link has to die fast and work exactly once.
Don’t hand-roll your security guts. Sessions, receipt verification, the permission check itself. Those are the precise places attackers specialize, they’re studied ground, and a maintained library has already eaten a decade of other people’s incidents that you’re otherwise going to eat personally, one bad night at a time, with your customers’ addresses in the blast radius.
And I told you not to hand-roll it and then I hand-rolled the whole goddamn thing. No framework, thousands of lines, session handling I wrote myself. Four of the sixteen incidents in that book are just me paying for that decision. Do what I say, not what I did, and yeah, I hear it.
Say this: I need a members area. Magic-link sign-in, no passwords. Use a maintained library for the session handling instead of writing it yourself, and tell me which library you used and why.
Can’t name the library? That’s your answer about what it just did.
Cost: more than you think. Genuinely. This is where the nights go.
The check: cancel your own subscription and try to get in. Not a test account. Yours, cancelled for real. Then block yourself and go look at whether the billing actually stopped, because mine didn’t and nothing in the system was ever going to tell me.
6. Rules for working with the machine
Short section. It’s the one everything above depends on.
You are not going to read the code. Let’s not pretend otherwise, because pretending is how this goes wrong. That means every check on this page stopped being optional and became the only instrument you’ve got.
Three rules.
Never accept “done.” It’ll tell you it’s finished and it’ll believe that, because it’s reporting on what it intended, same as I was reading my own template three times while the button charged the wrong number. “Show me” is an answer. “Done” isn’t.
One change at a time. Nine changes and a success message is one fact.
Nothing that touches money ships without you clicking the button afterward. Not reading the diff. Clicking.
Say this when it claims something works: Do not report success. Show me the actual output of the thing running, and tell me what you checked that would have caught this if it had failed.
The check: take the last thing it told you was working. Go verify it against the running system, not against a file describing the system. However that goes is your answer, and I’ve had it go badly enough to write a book about it.
7. Stage, then promote
Never deploy straight to live. Not for a typo, not at eleven at night when it’s obviously fine.
Build a copy only you can see. Look at it. Then go live.
Those five minutes aren’t really about typos. They’re about a whole class of defect that only exists on the surface a customer actually touches, the kind no amount of squinting at your own source will ever show you, because your source sits upstream of where the damage happens and you can read upstream all goddamn night without once arriving at it.
Say this: Give me two commands. One puts the site somewhere only I can see. One puts it live. Never combine them, and make the live one ask me to confirm.
The check: it’s the step. Click the buttons.
8. Watch it from outside
I had a job fail silently for twenty-eight consecutive nights, 18 June to 15 July.
Not crash. Fail. Every night it woke up, ran, wrote a line in its log saying it had run, and produced absolutely nothing, and every morning that log looked like a job doing its work. Twenty-eight of those. Twenty-eight mornings of a log that looked exactly like a job doing its job.
So: put your checks on a machine that is not the machine being watched. A thing that can’t see itself can’t tell you it’s gone blind.
And check for artifacts, not processes. “The job ran” is not information. Ran doing what? The file it was supposed to write, does that exist, is its timestamp from this morning, is there anything inside it. That’s information, and the gap between those two sentences is where twenty-eight nights went.
Say this: Set up a check that runs somewhere other than my machine, looks at the actual file the job produces, and messages me if it’s missing, old, or empty. Checking that the job ran is not good enough.
The check: break it on purpose. Go rename the file your monitor watches for. If your phone doesn’t buzz, you don’t have monitoring. You have a dashboard.
Every check on this page is the same check
Buy your own product. Cancel your own subscription. Click every money button. Rename the file and see if the phone rings.
Four different hats, one move underneath: stop reading the thing that describes the thing, and go touch the thing.
That’s the entire method and it’s the only part of this I’d defend to the death. The rest is tooling and tooling changes.
What it costs, honestly
The site is free. Static files at this volume cost nothing, and I mean nothing.
The domain is ten to fifteen a year.
The newsletter rail is around twenty a month once you’re past the free tier, and that’s the line item I’d defend hardest, for the reasons up in step 3.
The machine writing it is about another twenty.
The checkout takes a percentage when you sell and zero when you don’t.
What I’m not giving you is a confident monthly total, because when I sat down to check mine I found my own inventory disagreeing with my own billing by about fifteen dollars a month, and I still haven’t reconciled it. Every guide you’ll read on this hands you a tidy number. Ask that guy to open his actual bank statement on camera.
And since we’re doing outgoing honestly: this hasn’t made me rich yet. I’m working on it. Build it because you want the deed, which lands the day you buy the domain, and treat everything after that as a separate problem you get to solve on ground nobody can move.
What to skip
The radio station. The affiliate program. The advertising surface. All three are real, all three are downstream, and I built all three anyway because I’m like that. Nobody has ever failed at this because they lacked an affiliate program. Who told you that you needed one?
What happens after
You’ll build this and things will break. Every person writing about owning your own platform has had things break, and almost none of them print the list, because printing the list costs the impression that you knew what you were doing.
Mine’s printed. Sixteen incidents, dated, what each one cost, and four of them still open the day it went out. It’s called The Teardown and it’s five dollars.
The broader map of how the whole operation fits together, free, no wall, is The Method.
Go buy the domain. That part’s fifteen bucks and nobody can take it off you.
Related guides
- The Method: the whole operation, mapped, free
- Static vs WordPress: What a Writer Actually Needs: the decision above, argued properly
- Own Your Platform: what the platforms actually do, with the receipts
- How to Run an Owned Newsletter Instead of Renting One: step three, in full
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