# How this site is built, for free

The small stack behind this portfolio, and why it costs nothing to host.

Author: Alex Calabrese
Published: 2026-10-30
Canonical page: https://alexcalabrese.com/blog/how-this-site-is-built/

I wanted a personal site with plenty of motion that stayed fast and didn't add a monthly bill. Here's what I settled on.

## Static first

The site is built with [Astro](https://astro.build), which turns everything into plain HTML at build time. Posts like this one are just Markdown files in a folder, so publishing is a matter of adding a file.

## Motion where it counts

The living background uses a small, lazily loaded WebGL shader. Native scrolling and CSS handle the interactions. Animations run regardless of the system motion preference.

## Hosting

It runs as static assets on [Cloudflare Workers](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/static-assets/). Requests for static assets are free and unlimited, so the only real cost is renewing the domain.