Claude Coding apps on the cheap

Having a Claude Max subscription means you basically have the capacity to make limitless apps and other fun things.

It also means you’re out $100 a month, which doesn’t leave much left over for hosting. Here’s how you can run your projects on the cheap.

Serious projects – use a PaaS

Anything that needs to work, gets significant traffic, which has paying customers

For serious projects (especially ones you’re charging money for and get significant traffic) you should probably just use a proper platform-as-a-service like Heroku. It’s expensive for the amount of compute you get, but they handle deployments, monitoring, logging, add-ons and so on, leaving you to sleep at night.

Small projects

Projects which are getting some amount of traffic but can tolerate some downtime

Fronend-only

Anything that doesn’t need a backend can just be deployed to GitHub Pages or Vercel for free. Vercel gives you free analytics; on GitHub Pages you can add a Google Analytics (or similar) tracking code. You can run builds locally or just do them using GitHub Actions.

You would also be surprised how many things can be run with just a frontend. retreatsfyi was initially a Rails app with a few features that required backend (like setting up alerts). But for a project that’s so small those features weren’t critical, so now I have Claude scrape retreat centre websites, process the data locally into a static site, and then just deploy that, doing filtering on the frontend.

Projects with a backend

Anything that is backendful will need an actual server to run it. But if you’re a solo operator, you don’t actually need a real CI and deployment pipeline, because Claude can do it all for you locally.

Sign up for Hetzner and buy a cheap box. You can get a surprisingly capable one for about €6 a month. Generate an SSH key locally and launch the machine with the corresponding public key. From there, Claude can interact with it from your local machine.

Claude Code can write you a docker-compose file, SSH onto the box, set it up, pull your repo (or scp it) and run it. The benefit of using a VPS rather than a PaaS like Heroku is you get permanent storage, so you can store files locally and use a database like SQLite.

Set up a ‘/deploy’ skill in your project which runs your tests, and if they pass, SSHes onto the server, does a git pull, and runs docker-compose up.

Multiple projects on the same box

Use Caddy as a reverse-proxy. Claude will set up a Caddyfile for you, with multiple stanzas, one for each project. Just make sure it knows that other projects are running on there.

Backups

Use restic and AWS S3 to back up the box; Claude will write the cron job.

DNS

AWS Route53 can be interacted with using the aws CLI, so you can ask Claude to manage this for you once you’ve added your domain.

If you don’t want to have to buy a domain for each of your projects, just buy a general root domain and use subdomains for each of your projects.

Cloudflare has a free tier if you want to use them for DNS and get DDoS protection out-of-the-box, but that’s probably overkill.

Sending email

Use Postmark. You get 100 free a month.

Happy coding! 🧑‍💻