I Built an AI Publishing Stack for $31/Month — Real Numbers After 15 Posts

A developer built a solo AI publishing stack for $31 per month, running 15 blog posts with real traffic and revenue data. The stack uses self-hosted n8n on a Hetzner VPS, prompt caching to cut Claude API costs by 60%, and Cloudflare KV for analytics on the free tier. The project documents whether the automation can pay for itself.

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 https://builderlog.net/blog/automation-stack-31-per-month/ Happy to go deep on n8n setup, Claude API cost optimization, or the Cloudflare Workers + KV pattern.