How this site actually works

One pipeline. $0 / month.

AWSMindset is a personal field journal that publishes itself — almost. RSS feeds get drafted into Airtable by an LLM every morning, I review and approve, the site reflects the change within 60 seconds. The whole thing runs on free tiers.

Published

140

articles live

In review

6

drafts pending

Sources

10

RSS feeds active

Categories

4

content arcs

The pipeline

From RSS to reader, in five stages

Sources110FEEDSCron2PER DAYAI rewrite3AIREWRITEAirtable46DRAFTSReader5140PUBLISHEDEditor (you)

Tap any stage to see how it works.

Curated RSS feeds.

1. Sources

Ten engineering and AWS-focused feeds, ordered by editorial priority. AWS announcements and the AWS blog run first; Netflix, Uber, Meta, Pragmatic Engineer, React, web.dev, GitHub Blog, and Hacker News (filtered to 100+ points) fill the time budget.

rss-parserAWS What's NewAWS BlogsHacker News
Cost · Free · public RSS

The stack

Every tool, every cost

Twelve building blocks. Nothing exotic, nothing locked in. Everything picked for “stays free at this volume, swappable when it doesn't”.

Compute

  • Next.js 15

    App Router, RSC, ISR

    $0 · OSS
  • Vercel

    Edge hosting + daily cron

    $0 · Hobby tier
  • Node 20

    Runtime for cron + OG image gen

    $0 · bundled

Data

  • Airtable

    Posts, subscribers, contact messages

    $0 · 1.2k records
  • RSS feeds

    10 curated engineering sources

    $0 · public

AI

Comms

  • Resend

    Newsletter delivery

    $0 · 100/day
  • EmailJS

    Contact form (browser-side)

    $0 · 200/mo

Frontend

  • Tailwind v4

    CSS-first config, @theme tokens

    $0 · OSS
  • cmdk

    Command palette (⌘K)

    $0 · OSS
  • next/og

    Per-post OG images at the edge

    $0 · built-in
  • react-markdown

    GFM article rendering

    $0 · OSS

Total monthly cost

$0.00

Every layer of the stack lives within a generous free tier at this volume. The constraints push back well before the wallet does: Vercel Hobby caps at 1 cron/day, Gemini free tier at 15 RPM, Airtable at 1.2k records, Resend at 100 emails/day. If any of those become a ceiling, the cost is a small fraction of the alternative — Hobby → Pro is $20/mo, Airtable Pro is $20/mo, Resend Pro is $20/mo. Even at full upgrade, the bill stays under what a Cloudflare Workers Paid plan would cost.