I Saved $200 a Year by Rebuilding My Site With AI
How I replaced Squarespace with a zero-cost static Next.js site in a single low-attention coding session, saving $200 a year and taking full ownership of my online identity.
Drag the slider to compare before and after
The first commit on my revived personal website had nothing to do with aviation apps or databases. Instead, it was a Friday experiment in low attention coding, the kind of background project you tackle while half-listening to a podcast. Karpathy calls his style vibe coding; mine was more deliberate, but still casual enough that a full rewrite felt painless.
Why I Left Squarespace
- Cost – $200 per year for a generic template.
- Lag – Drag-and-drop editing crawled on both Safari and Chrome.
- Limited control – Custom tweaks always hid behind an upsell or a plugin.
One Afternoon With Claude
Claude, my AI pair-programmer, helped me move the entire site in a few focused hours:
- Zero hosting fee – Vercel’s hobby tier is free for a small personal project.
- Exact fit – React, Next.js, and Tailwind CSS gave me the layout I imagined.
- Speed gains – Static pages and built-in image optimization cut load times.
The Stack at a Glance
| Layer | Choice | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Framework | Next.js | File-based routing, static export |
| Styling | Tailwind CSS | Rapid iteration with utility classes |
| Components | Hero UI | Accessible primitives, minimal bloat |
| Hosting | Vercel | CI/CD out of the box, global edge CDN |
| AI Assist | Claude | Quick scaffolding and refactoring |
Roadblocks and Fixes
- Next.js plus Tailwind upgrade – JIT purged some runtime classes from Hero UI. Safelisted them in
tailwind.config.js. - Image paths – Relative assets broke after export. Switched to
next/imagefor automatic handling. - CSS order conflicts – Hero UI styles overrode utilities. Loaded Tailwind last to keep utility precedence.
Key Takeaways
The hard limit is no longer compute power—it is how fast I can learn. With an AI assistant, the feedback loop shrinks, but only if I understand each tool’s fundamentals first.
Next Steps
- Add a blog section to track future projects.
- Integrate a lightweight CMS for quick edits.
- Automate image resizing in CI with ImageMagick.
- Replace hard-coded social links with a JSON feed.
Bottom Line
A few hours of focused, low-attention work transformed my site from a paid, limited platform to a free, fully customized stack. Saving $200 a year is nice. Owning every pixel is better.