#49 - How I Reduced Costs by 85% Using AI
Leveraging AI and free hosting to create a sleek, affordable site
Why does cost matter?
Cost is a critical aspect of a product. To achieve product-market fit efficiently, you need to balance both income and value. Revenue represents value, but keeping costs low is equally essential. For example, if customers are loyal, valuable, and pay a decent amount, but acquiring them costs ten times their value, scaling becomes inefficient. Similarly, a feature with high usage that users enjoy might not be sustainable if the associated resource costs are too high.
When planning a product roadmap, the impact of a feature is just one side of the coin. The effort and maintenance it requires are the other. While it may not be a glamorous topic, cost is something we need to be mindful of and optimize when it makes sense.
How I started my site
A few years ago, I decided to build my own personal site—a space to showcase my work and share my thoughts. Later, I moved my blog to Medium and then to Substack, but that’s a story for another post. When I began this project, I naturally considered costs and chose what seemed reasonable at the time: a WordPress editor site hosted on a shared hosting plan. The cost was relatively low and billed annually, but it was still a recurring expense. As with other SaaS or online tools, the cost goes up over time, and mine had increased from ~$120 to ~$145.
A few months ago, I came across an interesting post about the cost of AI and strategies to reduce token expenses in products utilizing ChatGPT. This got me thinking about whether I could reduce the cost of my site and what tools I could leverage to achieve that. My main options were either finding a cheaper hosting plan or building a site from scratch with code and finding a simpler hosting solution. At the time, I didn’t want to invest more effort than I already had, so I simply assumed I would have to stick with the status quo.
New site, lower cost
Then, I came across v0. I had used it for some prototyping at work and thought, why not go all in and build a full site? I started experimenting with the free version and ended up creating something I truly liked. I decided to pay for the full version, which costs $20 a month, and began iterating to create a static site to replace my existing one.
At that point, I wasn’t sure how I was going to deploy it. So, I turned to my AI co-pilot, discussed the options, and discovered that Netlify offers a free hosting solution that matched my usage. I wasn’t entirely confident it would work, and I knew part of the process involved configuring a DNS from HostGator to Netlify. Honestly, the word “DNS” intimidated me. But I figured, why not give it a try?
The plan was straightforward:
Get the site to at least 80% of my desired result in v0.
Deploy it on Netlify.
Attach it to my custom domain.
Prototype
Working with v0 probably took the most time. It wasn’t difficult, but it required effort to communicate my vision to the AI—explaining what I was trying to achieve and the design I wanted. I shared screenshots of inspirational sites, provided videos, and gave custom instructions. It took about 20 to 30 iterations before we arrived at something I truly liked.
Once that was in place, the design system was ready, and we began personalizing it by incorporating all the text, images, and unique elements from my current site. Eventually, I had the homepage finalized. Like a good product manager, I understood that an MVP has to start somewhere, so I moved on to step 2 before building the other pages.
First deployment
I opened an account with Netlify, and it probably took me an hour or two to get everything working. I had to create a new Git repository, clone all the work I had done in v0 into it, ensure it had the proper build commands, and link it to Netlify.
It took some time to figure out the exact configuration required, mainly because, while v0 excels at creating Next.js applications, it doesn’t adhere well to standard directory structures or best practices. At one point, I even turned to YouTube and found a video showing a configuration someone else used, which finally resolved the issue.
With that, I had my site successfully deployed on Netlify. It was solid proof of concept that I was moving in the right direction.
Transferring the domain is reversible, but it felt like a danger zone I didn’t want to mess with until I was confident my site was ready to handle traffic. In a real-world scenario, there would likely be feature flags or other precautionary tools to manage such transitions.
Full working prototype
There were still issues with the homepage, like v0 using an online image I had uploaded instead of a static one from the assets folder. I decided to tackle that later since addressing it would cause a drift between the v0-generated code and my own. I continued working with v0 to build the new pages, ensuring the directories were structured properly and components were separated where relevant.
Finally, the site was complete in v0. I tested it for mobile compatibility, though I decided to overlook errors and linting issues for the time being. With that, I moved on to step 2.
Making the site production-ready
Working locally, I had to ensure my Git repository was in good shape—no console errors, no linting errors, and all images generated and loaded statically from the assets folder. While I had the technical knowledge to handle this, I used Cursor AI to assist with some of the changes, either by making adjustments directly or by following its guidance.
Thanks to the use of AI, this step took only about 30 minutes to ensure linting tests passed, the build succeeded, and the site was fully functional.
Now for the final step. It didn’t take much time, but when I changed the DNS, it felt a bit like I was breaking the internet. However, the next day, I woke up to see my new site live and running on my custom domain. At that point, I also disabled the renewal of my hosting plan with HostGator.
Overall, the entire process took me around 3 to 4 days.
Cost saving
So, how much did I save? My previous hosting plan with HostGator cost around $145 annually. With my new setup, I subscribed to v0 for one month at $20, and my hosting with Netlify is currently free. That’s a savings of approximately 85% annually, all while delivering a more flexible and modern site.
There are still some downsides, such as the lack of built-in plugins like Analytics and Google Console, or a lack of support. However, with the free versions of Cursor AI, ChatGPT, and Claude.ai, I have enough resources to figure out what changes I need to deploy.
Conclusion
A good product and result need a balance of effort and cost. The more we pay, the more value we expect. Reducing costs can boost satisfaction without sacrificing quality.