I've been building a solo content operation in public for the past month. The goal: run a real publishing workflow — blog posts, analytics, affiliate tracking — entirely on AI automation, and document whether it can pay for itself.
The full stack costs $31/month
- Claude API (~$20): content drafting, topic generation, quality checks
- Hetzner CX21 VPS (~$6): self-hosted n8n for workflow automation
- .dev domain (~$1): annualized
- GitHub Pro (~$4): private repos + Actions minutes
What's actually running on this
- Auto-publishes 1 post/day (EN + KO) from a topic queue
- Collects daily view counts via Cloudflare KV
- Tracks affiliate link clicks with a /go/ redirect layer
- Sends Telegram alerts when something breaks
15 posts live so far. Every post has real numbers — actual traffic, actual revenue, actual mistakes. No "lessons learned" without the receipts.
The parts people ask about most
n8n self-hosted: runs on the Hetzner VPS for free. Handles all scheduling, webhook routing, and API calls. Add a 2GB swap file early — n8n can spike on heavy loads.
Prompt caching: this one change cut Claude API costs by ~60%. Caching the system prompt and batching overnight runs brought spend from ~$40 to ~$20/month.
Cloudflare KV for analytics: Workers increment a view counter on each page load, a nightly cron rolls up daily totals. Free tier covers everything under ~100k reads/day — no separate analytics database needed.
Current status
The stack works. Whether it earns back the $31 is the question I'm documenting in real time.
Full breakdown with every line item: builderlog.net
Happy to go deep on n8n setup, Claude API cost optimization, or the Cloudflare Workers + KV pattern.
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