Goodbye, Netlify. Hello, Personal Server.
Sites, Sites, Sites
I love making websites. To quantify that, I've got 166 of them1. They range from my personal site2, with thousands of pages, to silly one offs. For example, the 26 single page sites I made for each letter of the alphabet3.
Where They're At
The sites are hosted on Netlify4. I started using them in 2020. They're when lead to me to end up with so many. Spinning up a new site is a low friction affair. I'd do it whenever I wanted to explore an idea.
Even better, I haven't paid a dime for hosting. Netlify offered a free tier when I signed up. It provided basic hosting for multiple sites as long as you didn't have too much overall traffic.
That free tier is going away.
Receiving Credit
Netlify is moving to "credit-based" plans5.
The pitch:
We’ve simplified our pricing to make it more transparent and predictable.
You get a certain number of credits per month. The new tiers are:
- Free: 300 credits
- Personal: 1,000 for $9/month
- Pro: 5,000 for $20/member/month
The "member" thing is for teams. Since I'm a solo developer, the Pro plan would be $20/month for me.
Credit Costs
Credits are spent for services:
That last one makes Netlify untenable for me.
To Many Changes
The math breaks down like this:
300 credits per month divided by 15 credits per update equals 20 updates per month
Today is Sept. 17th, 2025. I've already made 77 updates since the first of the month. That's 1,155 credits worth. More than both the Free and Personal plan offerings.
Paying for Change
I've got no problem with Netlify making this change. They're a business. Someone there believes this is the best way to make money. I don't fault that. It's just a bummer for me.
Paying for Netlify is an option. I won't be taking it though. First off, there are other places where I could get free hosting. But, I'm not going that direction either.
Fully Operational
Free hosting options work great up to a point. Netlify is no exception. I've had to work within their limits. Sacrificing dynamic ideas to stay within the bounds of their free tier's offerings8.
I'm tired of the constraints. I want to be able to explore any idea that comes to mind. Netlify can't support that. Even their paid plans lock you in to specific technologies9.
Not only do I not want to be locked in. I don't want to use the tech stack they're optimized for at all.
Instead, I'm putting my own steak in the ground. Setting up my own server. One I'll have full control over. Offering infinitely more options that what I can get with Netlify.
And, the wildest part... It's only gonna cost five bucks a month.
-a
Endnotes
I haven't picked a company to host my server yet. But, they all have plans with enough power for me at $5/month.
Footnotes
A bunch of my sites. Not all of them, by any stretch. Lots are old and could really be deleted. There's just been no incentive to spend the time to go through them.
Which you're probably reading this on unless you're reading the RSS feed.
Where my sites are, for the time being...
This is the post announcing the pricing change. There's a sectionon it that says:
Current customers: You can stay on your legacy plan with no action required. The ability to optionally update to new plans will be available soon.
But, after making this move, I don't trust them not to change the "optionally update to new plans" to "you have to...".
The 1 credit per form submission is wild. I don't know how they are set up, but the fact that form submissions are like 1,000 per credit is wild. It feels like Apple marking up RAM by a zillion percent.
I haven't looked at my traffic but I wouldn't be surprised if I did more than a GB in some months. My photos site has 19 images that total ~5.7MB. That's 1GB of traffic if 175 folks hit that one page.
Specifically, using a static site instead of something where I could make pages dynamically. Netlify offers ways to do that. Some of which I could use a little on the free tier but not everything.
Netlify is geared for the JamStack and are largely built around JavaScript. I do most of my stuff in Rust these days.