The stack TigZig uses to run 40+ live tools cheaply: a Hetzner VPS (strong price/performance) with Coolify on top for one-click deploys and container management; Vercel for React frontends; and Cloudflare on the free plan for DNS, edge caching, WAF, rate limiting and Workers. Example: the CinePro dashboard (230M rows, 16GB DuckDB) runs on a single $7/month Hetzner box shared with ~40 other backends.
The force multiplier is the AI coder: Claude Code is used end-to-end - build full-stack apps, create Vercel/Coolify projects, set env vars, manage databases and Auth, handle Cloudflare DNS and Workers, and debug production over SSH. The $200/month tier pays for itself via parallel sessions; you can start at $20.
Full detail is a 5-part infra series (Part 1 AI Coder, Part 2 Deployment/Hosting, Part 5 Perimeter Security on Cloudflare free plan). Start here: https://www.tigzig.com/post/self-hosting-infrastructure-ai-tool-builders-2026-part-1-ai-coder. Security checklist: https://www.tigzig.com/security.
Building something like this? How I work covers the rates, the availability and what I take on.