[ TRANSPARENCY ]
How the work is built
Real API costs, technical decisions, mistakes acknowledged. No marketing here — just the operational backstage. Updated May 17, 2026.
This page exists because almost nobody in the sector publishes this and I’d like to read it on other consultants’ sites. Real cost of operating my infrastructure, what decisions I made and why, what went wrong and how it was solved. No marketing filter.
Monthly infrastructure cost
| Service | Plan | Cost/month |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Cloud CX23 | VPS Ubuntu 24.04 | ~€5 |
| Cloudflare | Free | €0 |
| Turso (libSQL) | Free | €0 |
| Resend (transactional email) | Free (3,000/month) | €0 |
| Sentry | Free (no Replay) | €0 |
| Backblaze B2 (backups) | Pay-as-you-go | <€1 |
| Banahosting (domain mail) | Minimal mailbox | ~€3 |
| Total infrastructure | ~€10/month |
Cost of working APIs
| API / Service | Plan | Cost/month |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic API (Opus 4.7 + Haiku) | Pay-as-you-go | ~€80 |
| DataForSEO API | Pay-as-you-go | ~€120 |
| Semrush Pro | Annual | ~€120 |
| Ahrefs Lite | Monthly (when needed) | ~€99 |
| Screaming Frog | Annual license | ~€17 (prorated) |
| Total SEO + AI tooling | ~€436/month |
Conscious technical decisions
- Next.js 15 over WordPress for performance + control.
- Custom CSS variables (no Tailwind).
- Self-hosted Umami over Google Analytics (cookieless, GDPR-clean).
- No affiliate links anywhere on this site.
- No invasive cookie banner (no GA, no tracking cookies, so no need).
- Magic link auth (no passwords) for the upcoming AI Workshop.
Acknowledged mistakes
- Accidental token leak during Coolify setup (2026-05-17): snapshotting the «Developer view» textarea of Environment Variables exposed secret values in the Claude Code transcript. Mitigation: immediate rotation of 2 of 5 affected secrets. The other 3 carry residual risk pending rotation.
- Coolify initial build failed on default Node 18 (2026-05-17): Nixpacks uses Node 18 by default (EOL). Fix: versioned
nixpacks.tomlpinning Node 22. Lesson: don’t trust Nixpacks to readengines.nodeor.nvmrc; use the explicit file. - Outage from CF Spain block (2026-05-17): after a routine push, the site went down. Initial diagnosis was Coolify build fail; real cause was the mass blocking of Cloudflare IPs in Spain by court order during a LaLiga match. Mitigation: temporary CF bypass. Documented for future diagnoses.
What I don’t bill for even if it takes time
- Initial free 10-min review before accepting a client.
- Free 30-min diagnostic call after accepting a client.
- 7 days post-audit email support included.
- Maintenance of open-source scripts on GitHub.
What I won’t do even if paid
- Buy fake reviews for a client.
- Aggressive link building on spam networks.
- Publish 100% AI-generated content without human editing.
- Black-hat SEO (cloaking, doorway pages, etc.).
- Work for sectors I’m not comfortable with ethically.
For the tech stack detail, see /uses. For what I’m doing now, /now.