What We Use
The actual tools behind this site. What they cost. What else we considered. No fiction.
This page lists every tool in our operating stack. Where we have an affiliate relationship, it is marked. Where we use a free or self-hosted tool but recommend a paid alternative in our reviews, we explain why. Transparency is the point.
Same stack runs BeatsVine, MainMenu, OrangutanFamily, and the rest of Raging Orangutan Holdings. The costs and trade-offs below are the real numbers from running a portfolio of about eleven products, not just one site.
Next.js
Static export means zero server runtime cost and fast page loads. We know it well enough to ship without fighting it.
Astro was a close second. Hugo is fast but we prefer React components. 11ty is solid but the ecosystem is smaller.
Hostinger VPS
One VPS runs the entire portfolio. CloudPanel makes Nginx config painless. Static files are served directly with no Node.js runtime needed.
Hetzner is the best raw value if you are comfortable on the command line. DigitalOcean has the best docs. Vercel is free at our traffic levels but we prefer owning the infrastructure for portability.
Hostinger
Consolidation. Hosting and domains in one place simplifies billing. We currently run roughly 10 domains across the portfolio - some standard .com, some pricier .gg and .ai for specific projects.
Cloudflare Registrar is at-cost pricing and arguably better value. Namecheap is solid. We prefer fewer logins over saving a few pounds per domain per year.
Cloudflare
Turnstile is the privacy-respecting CAPTCHA replacement we use on forms. Free tier covers our needs. DNS management is also through Cloudflare for sites that need it.
reCAPTCHA pulls Google scripts and creates a privacy story we did not want to defend. hCaptcha is fine but we already had Cloudflare for other reasons.
Umami (self-hosted)
Privacy-first, no cookies, we own the data. Open source means no vendor lock-in. Self-hosting is part of the discipline.
Both are excellent. If we did not want to self-host, we would pick Fathom. We recommend it in our reviews for founders who do not want to manage infrastructure.
Resend
Developer-first API, great deliverability. Originally on the free tier - the cost jumped to $20/mo once we passed the free domain limit. Running multiple domains across the portfolio means more verified senders, which pushes you out of free tier.
Postmark is arguably more reliable for transactional. SendGrid has a bigger free tier but worse developer experience. Amazon SES is cheapest at scale but has the sandbox-approval risk we wrote about elsewhere.
MXRoute
One-time payment many years ago, still running. The kind of lifetime deal that aged well. We use it for business inboxes across the portfolio.
Zoho free tier is the most accessible starting point. Fastmail is excellent if you want polish and want to pay monthly. Google Workspace works but the lock-in is real.
Bitwarden
Free tier is more capable than most paid competitors. Open source, the trust model is clean, and the interface is functional. We are planning to migrate to self-hosted Vaultwarden once the server setup is stable.
1Password is more polished but the price adds up. Proton Pass is good if you are already in the Proton ecosystem. Bitwarden gets the job done for free.
GitHub
Industry standard. Actions for CI, Pages as a backup deploy target, ecosystem integration is unmatched.
GitLab is more feature-complete out of the box. Codeberg is the open-source friendly alternative. GitHub just has better ecosystem integration.
Claude Code
AI coding assistant we use as a productivity layer for development work. The largest single line item on the operating bill. Justified by the time it compresses on routine tasks - documented in our AI tools article.
Cursor and Copilot are widely used and viable alternatives we have not run in production. Google Antigravity (which we did try) silently throttled tier limits, which was the trust break for us.
Uptime Kuma (self-hosted)
Self-hosted uptime monitoring. We get email alerts when anything goes down. Part of the same self-hosting discipline as Umami.
UptimeRobot free tier is fine for one or two sites. Better Uptime is polished if you want to pay. For 11 sites, self-hosting Uptime Kuma is more practical and free.
Paddle
Merchant of Record - handles global tax compliance, VAT, and invoicing. Used for paid products in the portfolio (PennyBlack itself does not sell anything).
Stripe has lower headline fees (2.9% + 30p) but you handle tax compliance yourself. On a £8.99 sub, Paddle's effective fee is around 9.5%. Worth the MoR convenience if you sell globally; less so if you only sell domestically.
UK business bank account
Required for sole trader operation. The per-incoming-transaction fee matters when small affiliate payouts arrive - PayPal and Amazon Associates have both sent 1p sweep payments that cost us 35p to receive.
Most challenger banks have lower per-transaction fees but their international reach varies. Our setup is constrained by what works with our Isle of Man jurisdiction.
Roughly £20 per product per month for hosting, email, productivity, monitoring, and operational infrastructure across the eleven projects. A meaningful chunk of that is the AI coding assistant. The rest is hosting, banking, transactional email, and amortised domains. Everything else is either free tier, self-hosted, or a lifetime deal that aged well. This is what running a portfolio at a deliberately lean level actually looks like.