Free Tier Hosting Stack

Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare Pages ship static sites for $0 - until build caps, queues, or account limits bite.

Key Concept

• Hard caps on Cloudflare free: about 500 builds per month per account, one concurrent build, 20,000 files per deployment, and a 20-minute build timeout.
• Level 1: Free hosting has strict limits - five hundred builds a month, one at a time, like a capped gym pass.
• Level 2: The free tier is like a shared metered hose - bandwidth looks unlimited, but build count and queue time drain the budget first.
• Level 3: Because build count and queue time are the traps, fat repos and frequent pushes burn the budget faster than bandwidth ever will.
• Level 4: Batch commits, pin HUGO_VERSION, and count builds before you add another client who pushes daily - one account hosting many clients burns fast.
• Level 5: Static bandwidth is unmetered - the traps are build count, queue time, and fat repos; Selling Static Sites and Digital Garden share the same pipeline when clients push often.
• Static bandwidth is unmetered - the traps are build count, queue time, and fat repos.
• Flow: Hugo turns markdown into HTML, GitHub holds source, Cloudflare Pages builds on push and serves over CDN.
• Full walkthrough: How I Built JoRap Notes - same pipeline for Selling Static Sites and the Digital Garden.
• No database, no admin panel - which is why Static Site Client Scope matters.
• One account hosting many clients who push often burns the 500-build budget fast; pin HUGO_VERSION on every project.

Examples

• Twelve client sites on one free account - hit 500 builds mid-month and Friday deploys started queuing.
• Build failed until Hugo was pinned - env var on every new project template now, and that failure still counted against the cap.

Note Relationships