I Replaced My $100/Month Cloud Bill With This Free Stack — 6 Months In, Zero Downtime

Description and use

Reduced monthly costs from $100 to $0 over six months with zero downtime by migrating to a free stack of Cloudflare, Neon, and Supabase.

Problem

High monthly cloud costs ($100/month) for a zero-revenue side project.

Outcome

Reduced monthly spend from ~$100 to $0, saving $600 over six months with zero downtime.

Workflow

• 1. Replace frontend with Cloudflare Pages (unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/mo).
• 2. Move backend API to Cloudflare Workers (100k requests/day).
• 3. Switch database to Neon (0.5 GB, autoscaling to zero).
• 4. Use Supabase Auth for authentication (50k MAU).
• 5. Store files in Cloudflare R2 (10 GB, zero egress).
• 6. Replace VPS cron with Cloudflare Cron Triggers (free).
• 7. Deploy Worker with npm create cloudflare@latest my-api, set Neon DB URL via wrangler secret put, then wrangler deploy.
• 8. Query Neon from Worker using @neondatabase/serverless.
• 9. Monitor uptime to confirm zero downtime.

Evidence

Real traffic on this project last month: 41,000 requests, 2.1 GB bandwidth, ~180 MB database.

Source

Cold start on Neon after hibernation: ~300ms on first query. Cloudflare Workers: no cold starts at all.

Source