Farewell, Squarespace!
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We live in — to put it mildly — “perverse” times. Back in 2015, services like Squarespace already let you build a website without writing a single line of code. Piecing it together still cost several days, 80€ a year wasn’t exactly cheap, and some things were impossible or only worked in hacky ways. Still, having my own web presence without any coding was cool. None of my friends or fellow students had that. It was worth it to me.
Over eleven years those costs add up, though: a year of Squarespace is now a full 180€ (the year before it was 130€), and I’ve probably spent more than 1,000€ in total just keeping this site alive. With no direct return. I did collect some praise for it over the past decade, and a few contact requests. But as a personal homepage, it simply isn’t worth that to me anymore.
So yesterday I sat down with my Claude Code Max subscription and simply rebuilt the entire site over the course of a few hours. In principle the site already looked very good after a single hour and three prompts — but of course I couldn’t hold back and kept making improvements. My new site is not a perfect clone, and its design isn’t as cool as the Squarespace one. But it’s fast, runs on practically zero JavaScript, supports light and dark mode, and all content is plain markdown files. Blog posts like this one are literally markdown files in a folder. And the site itself I edit through an AI agent.
Here’s the coup, though: now that it’s built, this site costs me practically nothing. Hosting via GitHub and Cloudflare is free, and after the move to Cloudflare the domain runs ~$10 a year. Even a free tier of Codex or Claude Code could keep editing this site. And besides that: so could I.
And not just me. Today, in theory, anyone can do this. I didn’t look at the code once during the move. Everything runs reliably, and I can iterate much faster. The limits exist only in my imagination. Which brought me to a realization: in 2026, it’s honestly almost stupid not to have your own homepage.
Want to know how it’s done? Send me a message.