Building a $0 Platform on the Edge

Most of a personal site is content that never changes between requests. That observation drives the whole architecture: render everything ahead of time, and reach for a server only for the few things that genuinely need state.

The shape of the system

Pages are generated at build time and served from Cloudflare’s CDN. Only two features need a database: view counts and claps. Those live in D1 and are reached through small API routes that run as a Worker.

Why atomic upserts

Two readers clapping at once must not lose an update. A read-modify-write in application code races; a single SQL statement does not:

INSERT INTO post_stats (slug, claps) VALUES (?1, ?2)
ON CONFLICT(slug) DO UPDATE SET claps = claps + excluded.claps
RETURNING views, claps;

The same idea in TypeScript, as it appears in the API route:

const row = await env.DB.prepare(sql)
  .bind(slug, count)
  .first<{ views: number; claps: number }>();

return Response.json({ views: row?.views ?? 0, claps: row?.claps ?? 0 });

The best database round trip is the one you never make. The second best is the one that does everything in a single statement.

What it costs

Piece	Free tier
Pages hosting	Unlimited static requests
Workers	100k requests / day
D1	5M rows read / day

Takeaways

1. Prerender by default.
2. Push state into a single atomic statement.
3. Fetch dynamic numbers on the client so the page itself stays cacheable.