I've been building a solo content operation in public for the past month. The goal: run a real publishing workflow — blog posts, analytics, affiliate tracking — entirely on AI automation, and document whether it can pay for itself.
15 posts live so far. Every post has real numbers — actual traffic, actual revenue, actual mistakes. No "lessons learned" without the receipts.
n8n self-hosted: runs on the Hetzner VPS for free. Handles all scheduling, webhook routing, and API calls. Add a 2GB swap file early — n8n can spike on heavy loads.
Prompt caching: this one change cut Claude API costs by ~60%. Caching the system prompt and batching overnight runs brought spend from ~$40 to ~$20/month.
Cloudflare KV for analytics: Workers increment a view counter on each page load, a nightly cron rolls up daily totals. Free tier covers everything under ~100k reads/day — no separate analytics database needed.
The stack works. Whether it earns back the $31 is the question I'm documenting in real time.
Full breakdown with every line item: builderlog.net Happy to go deep on n8n setup, Claude API cost optimization, or the Cloudflare Workers + KV pattern.