TL;DR



Astro on S3 + CloudFront with OAC, DNS on Cloudflare (saves $49/year vs Route 53 on a .ai domain), email via SES + Lambda forward — total cost under $5/month with no managed platform dependency.
Every post URL returns a 404 out of the box: CloudFront's DefaultRootObject only applies to /, not subdirectories — fix is a 15-line CloudFront...