Cloudsteading is live

We started Cloudsteading because the same conversation kept repeating: we are paying $400/mo for X and we could have built it ourselves on Cloudflare in an afternoon.

Cloudsteading is the directory of those builds. Every entry answers four questions:

• What did it replace? A specific paid SaaS, named.
• What is the loadout? Workers, D1, R2, Durable Objects, Workers AI — whatever it actually used.
• What did it cost? Before and after, monthly, in dollars.
• What did you give up? The honest tradeoffs — managed dashboards, enterprise SSO, hosted UIs.

The first build

The WebSocket Sower — Pusher Channels, replaced in 15 minutes for ~$0/mo. A single Worker accepting WS upgrades, one Durable Object class per channel, hibernation between messages. Public on GitHub. Public writeup. Public costs.

What is next

Every teardown is named after the homestead role it plays:

• The Sower — broadcasting (Pusher, Ably, PubNub)
• The Carrier — delivery (Mailgun, Postmark)
• The Forager — search (Algolia, Typesense)
• The Gatekeeper — auth (Auth0, Clerk)
• The Watchman — observability (Sentry, Datadog)
• The Reeve — payments tooling (Chargebee, Recurly)

Each one is a public GitHub repo, a public writeup, and a public cost line. No private listings, no paid tier, no sponsorship to get featured. Build, share, own.

How to get involved

• Submit a build — the repo has to be public on GitHub. We will run a public-repo gate at submission, then queue it for review.
• Subscribe to the weekly digest.
• Watch the live build lab — every Sower we ship gets a teardown stream.

Cloudsteading is for the people tired of renting and ready to own.