Running a Website for £1.50 a Month

Another tech post: If you’re here for photography, this isn’t it. Check out the latest blog posts for that. But if you’re curious how this site runs on pocket change, read on.

I’ve written before about the architecture behind this site - the Astro frontend, headless WooCommerce backend, Gelato print fulfillment, all wired together with webhooks. But I glossed over something important: the cost.

This entire site costs me about £1.50 a month to run.

Why Does Cost Matter?

Here’s the thing about side projects: most of them don’t make money. At least not at first. Maybe not ever. And that’s fine - not everything needs to be a business. Sometimes you just want to share your photos, write some blog posts, maybe sell the odd print.

But there’s a trap I’ve seen people fall into. They get excited about an idea, sign up for Squarespace or Shopify, and suddenly they’re paying £20-30 a month for a site that might get ten visitors. That’s £240-360 a year. For a hobby.

After a few months of nothing happening, the enthusiasm fades. The subscription feels like a tax on a dream that didn’t pan out. Eventually they cancel, the site disappears, and another project dies.

I didn’t want that for Charity Shot.

The £1.50 Breakdown

So where does that £1.50 go?

Pikapods: ~£1/month

This is the only thing I actually pay for hosting. Pikapods runs my WordPress + WooCommerce instance - the backend that handles products, orders, and checkout. It’s a managed container hosting service with dead simple pricing. My instance uses minimal resources, so it costs almost nothing.

Everything else: £0

• Cloudflare Pages hosts the actual website you’re looking at. Free tier. Unlimited bandwidth (within reason). Global CDN. Automatic deployments from Git.
• Buttondown handles the newsletter. Free up to 100 subscribers.
• Gelato does print fulfillment. No monthly fee - they take a cut when something sells.
• Domain costs maybe £10/year, but that’s a one-time purchase not monthly hosting.

The only thing that adds a bit is Plausible Analytics at around £9/month - but that’s optional. You could use nothing, or use the free tier of something else. I like Plausible because it’s privacy-focused and doesn’t require cookie banners.

What Would the Alternatives Cost?

Let’s compare.

Squarespace

The cheapest plan with commerce features is £27/month (billed annually). That’s £324/year. You get a nice drag-and-drop editor and templates, but you’re locked into their ecosystem. Want to do something custom? Good luck.

Shopify

Basic Shopify is £25/month plus transaction fees on top of payment processor fees. That’s £300/year minimum, and they take a cut of every sale unless you use Shopify Payments.

WordPress.com Business

£25/month to run plugins like WooCommerce. Again, £300/year.

Wix eCommerce

Starts at £17/month. That’s £204/year for their basic commerce plan.

Self-Hosted VPS

You could run your own server on DigitalOcean or similar. A basic droplet is £4-5/month. Sounds cheap, but then you’re responsible for security updates, backups, SSL certificates, and everything else. It adds up in time if not money.

The Trade-Offs

I’m not going to pretend the £1.50 approach is perfect. There are real trade-offs.

Setup time: This took longer to build than clicking “Start free trial” on Squarespace. I had to learn Astro, figure out the WooCommerce REST API, set up webhooks, and wire everything together. If you’re not comfortable with code, this isn’t the path for you.

No visual editor: I write blog posts in Markdown and push them via Git. There’s no drag-and-drop. For me that’s actually a feature - I prefer writing in my text editor. But it’s not for everyone.

Build times: When I add a product or publish a post, the site needs to rebuild. Takes 2-3 minutes. Not a big deal for a photography site, but if you were running something with constantly changing inventory, it’d be annoying.

Separate checkout domain: The shop lives at charityshot.co.uk but checkout happens at checkout.charityshot.co.uk. Slightly awkward, but most people don’t notice or care.

The Philosophy

The real point here isn’t the specific tools. It’s the mindset.

When you’re starting something new - a photography portfolio, a blog, a small shop - you don’t know if it’ll work. You don’t know if anyone will care. And that’s okay. The worst thing you can do is commit to expensive infrastructure for something that might not go anywhere.

Start cheap. Start simple. Build something that costs you almost nothing to keep running. That way, if it takes off, brilliant - you can upgrade. And if it doesn’t? You haven’t wasted hundreds of pounds on hosting for a site nobody visited.

There’s no shame in a side project staying a side project. But there’s something sad about killing one just because the hosting bill got too depressing.

The Stack, Summarised

For the technically curious, here’s what powers this site:

• Frontend: Astro (static site generator)
• Backend: WooCommerce on Pikapods (~£1/month)
• Hosting: Cloudflare Pages (free)
• Print fulfillment: Gelato (pay per order)
• Newsletter: Buttondown (free tier)
• Analytics: Plausible (optional, ~£9/month)

I wrote a detailed technical breakdown of how it all fits together: Building a Headless eCommerce Stack. That post has architecture diagrams, code snippets, and all the details if you want to build something similar.

Final Thoughts

£1.50 a month. Less than a coffee. That’s what it costs me to have a portfolio, a blog, and a print shop online.

Is it the easiest path? No. Is it the cheapest? For what it does, probably yes.

More importantly, it means I never have to think “is this site worth £25 a month?” I can just let it exist, add to it when I feel like it, and not worry about whether it’s earning its keep.

Sometimes the best investment in a side project is keeping the costs low enough that it can survive your own indifference.

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Questions about this setup? The contact page has details.