Until this week, runway03.se was a Framer site. It worked good enough but there has been a renewed discussion in the age of AI on why we need to use web hosting services anymore. Why are we paying 150-300 dollars a year for loads of templates we never use and websites that essentially stay the same all year round with minor updates only.
When my Framer subscription came up for renewal last year, I had a feeling it wouldn’t last long. But I let it slip. When the renewal mail came yesterday I cloned and rebuilt the website on Cloudflare and launched it … all from my phone while on the flight home from overseas (thanks Starlink!!)
Why move?
Framer is a good tool for designing a page. But the strength of it’s design and templates was always let down by a really fiddly CMS system for publishing articles. On top of that, if I wanted to translate the site to Swedish it would cost double the annual price. On top of that, until last week it had no good MCP access to allow for AI automation.
In short, its not fit for my needs and it just created barriers to me in publishing news and updates on impulse.
Astro and Cloudflare
I’ve had some great success at work using Astro as a simple, free and easy to use website design and publishing framework and Squawkr is hosted essentially for free on Cloudflare - so this became my solution for the Runway 03 website. I can make structural redesign and major changes using Claude Code and its super simple to push these as changes that are then hosted for free on Cloudflare.
Cloudflare seem to have taken a strong approach to attract application developers to their platform - essentially offering free basic app and web hosting services in order to capture high growth applications and lock them in when they become a source of revenue. Fine by me.
How publishing works
An AI chat is enough to create a draft article thats pushed into a simple Sveltia CMS web editor (open source) and then I can go in and manually tweak any article to my liking. Adding pictures and links is simple and when I am ready to publish its just a button push, the repository is updated and the article is live.
What does this mean?
I call this the black hole effect of AI - a whole load of legacy and modern services that we have simply accepted to pay hundreds of dollars every year are now essentially redundant for amateur digital people like me. Not for everyone for sure but who knows how this will look in 2 to 3 years time.
As I write this, Claude have just announced their personal finance service …