Stop renting
your stack.
Every dollar your team pays them is a dollar you don't keep.
Cloudsteading is a build lab for people who are done. We map the SaaS, pick the Cloudflare loadout, assemble it on stream, and ship the source. The escape is open and the lights are on.
Every modern SaaS used to be a script.
The realtime feed. The search box. The form intake. The marketing list. The docs site. The comments thread. The status page. The crawl pipeline.
These are small applications. They were small applications fifteen years ago. They are small applications today.
What changed is the bill. Every one of them got wrapped in a logo, a dashboard, and a $99-per-seat sticker — and now a four-person team is spending five figures a month renting features it could host on a Tuesday afternoon. Most of those features are sitting unused, locked behind an enterprise tier sold to someone three departments away.
We are not anti-software. We are anti-paying-rent on software you could own.
The default got expensive
while we weren't looking.
The platform finally caught up.
For most of the last decade, "self-host it" meant an EC2 box, a Postgres bill, a Redis bill, a Docker registry, a load balancer, a TLS cert, a cron, and six months of maintenance debt before your first real user.
Cloudflare collapsed that whole stack into one config and a single wrangler deploy. Compute, data, files, queues, durable state, AI, edge auth — all behind one binding interface.
The thing you used to rent is now an env.-binding away.
This site exists because that platform shift made the math change. We're documenting where it works, where it doesn't, and what an honest small-team escape actually looks like.
Picture a four-person team
that owns its stack.
Monday morning, the bill from Pusher doesn't arrive. The realtime channel is theirs. It runs on a Worker they can read.
The docs site isn't behind a logo and a per-seat tier. It's a folder of markdown they ship the same way they ship the rest of the product.
The form intake doesn't get acquired and shut down in eighteen months. It's a Worker route, a D1 row, an email. Forever theirs.
The search box, the comments, the changelog, the auth flow — all of them primitives they own. None of them line items in someone else's annual report.
That team isn't paying $5,000 a month for software. They're paying their platform bill, and the platform bill scales with what they actually do.
That's the team Cloudsteading is for.
Owning is the rebellion.
What we believe.
- 01
Renting is the default. Owning is the rebellion.
Every team accepts the bill because nobody told them they had a choice. We're telling them.
- 02
The bill doesn't have to keep going up.
The same five tools rented at $99 a seat used to be a script. They still are.
- 03
Build it. Ship it. Keep it.
No vendor migrations. No deprecation emails. No "we've been acquired." It runs because you run it.
- 04
Replace what's load-bearing. Skip the rest.
Most pricing tiers exist to sell features you'll never touch. We map the work that actually matters and replace only that.
- 05
Render to release, in public.
Every escape gets a live teardown. Camera on, repo open, mistakes broadcast. It either works or it doesn't — both are useful.
- 06
Warts on. Always.
Honest tradeoffs beat invented numbers. We list the scale ceiling, the missing features, and the bits that'll wake you up at 3am.
- 07
Cloudflare is the floor.
When the owned version needs email, payments, AI, or anything else — we say so. No pretending the platform does what it doesn't.
- 08
No source, no escape.
If you can't read it, change it, and run it somewhere else, it isn't a replacement. It's another rental.
The fine print.
A manifesto without limits is just marketing. Here's where we deliberately stop.
- No.01
No fake savings.
Every dollar comparison links to the live pricing page. If we can't source it, we don't print it.
- No.02
No enterprise SLAs.
A small build doesn't replace a vendor's 99.99% guarantee, support team, or compliance auditors. If those matter, keep paying.
- No.03
No bypass kits.
Crawl candidates respect robots.txt and rate limits. We're here to escape your stack, not make you a more efficient pirate.
- No.04
No replace-everything dogma.
Payments, identity, certain compliance gates — those are exactly where you should be paying. We say so on the page.
- No.05
No compliance theatre.
No SOC 2 promises stapled to a side project. If you need paper, the rented version is the right call.
Compare the shape, not the sticker.
We don't headline made-up dollar figures. We compare the cost shape — what scales the bill, and how — and link to each vendor's pricing page so you can verify what you'd actually pay today.
Tiered: Sandbox → Startup → Pro → Premium. Per-message platform fee, peak-connection caps.
Verify on Pusher Channels's pricing page ↗Workers Paid base + Durable Object request usage. No per-message platform fee — costs scale with raw requests.
Per-seat team plans, then Business + Enterprise. Pricing scales with users and content gates.
Verify on GitBook's pricing page ↗
Free up to a small request quota; paid tiers priced per record + per request.
Verify on Algolia's pricing page ↗D1 + Vectorize for hybrid keyword + semantic. Workers AI for embeddings. Pay for the queries you make.
From rent to ship.
- 01Map the rent
Identify the small-team workflow you're actually paying for, target by target.
- 02Pick the loadout
Choose Cloudflare primitives that cover the data, compute, auth, and delivery path for that job.
- 03Build in public
Assemble the first version on stream — render, code, deploy, all visible.
- 04Ship deployable
Publish the repo, the writeup, the limits, the tradeoffs. The escape goes in the catalogue.
“If you can't read it, change it, and run it somewhere else, it isn't a replacement. It's another rental.”
If you've already escaped — show your work.
Every team that owns its stack proves the next team can. Drop a build into the queue and we'll map the target, the loadout, the tradeoffs, and put it on stream.
Or read the manifesto from the top again. We'll wait.
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