A running theme of this series is that one person shipped a product with global infrastructure. The quiet enabler is that in 2026, the infrastructure an indie needs is either free, nearly free, or generous in ways that would have sounded fictional a decade ago. This chapter is the gratitude ledger: the services this product runs on, what each actually does for us, and the caveats, because dependence deserves clear eyes.
Cloudflare, which does a frankly unreasonable amount
Three separate Cloudflare products carry this project:
- Workers run the entire licensing service and AI relay: the sign-in endpoints, webhook processing, entitlement minting, and the zero-retention model proxy from the payments chapter. No server, no patching, no capacity planning; a single JavaScript file deployed to every edge location, with a cron trigger that emails us a Monday health digest.
- D1, the SQLite-at-the-edge database, holds the subscription mirror, device tokens, and AI usage metering. For a product whose local engine is also SQLite, there is a pleasing symmetry in the server side being one too.
- R2 serves every download: installers, update artifacts, the pinned sidecar builds. The decisive feature is free egress. A popular release week on egress-billed storage is a bill; on R2 it is a shrug. For anyone distributing desktop binaries, this one property changes the economics.
The monthly total for all of it, at our scale, rounds to zero.
The supporting cast
- Resend delivers the 6-digit sign-in codes. Transactional email is a domain where "usually works" is failure, and delegating deliverability (SPF, DKIM, reputation) to a service with a generous free tier turned an operations problem into an API call.
- DigiCert's public timestamp authority deserves more appreciation than it gets: a free, standards-compliant RFC 3161 service, run by a name that means something in the rooms where our proofs are read. Every certified backup leans on a public good that a commercial CA simply provides to the internet.
- Google's Gemini on Vertex AI is the one paid service in this chapter, and it earns its place for a different kind of generosity: taking a solo developer's zero-data-retention request seriously and approving it in days. Flash Lite pricing makes AI summaries cost pennies; the retention posture makes them shippable at all.
- GitHub Pages serves the site you are reading, straight from the repository, free.
The clear-eyed part
Gratitude is not naivety, so three caveats belong in writing. First, free tiers are marketing budgets, and marketing budgets change; everything above sits behind small abstractions, and the licensing service was explicitly designed so a provider swap is a port, not a rewrite. Second, concentration risk is real: Cloudflare carrying your API, database, and distribution means a Cloudflare incident is your incident, a trade we accept knowingly at this scale. Third, generosity flows toward workloads like ours (small, cacheable, bursty); if this product someday streams terabytes, the math changes, and the math should be re-run then rather than assumed.
But the headline stands. The marginal infrastructure cost of a competent indie product in 2026 is approximately a domain name. The gap between having an idea and having it running globally has never been thinner, and the services in this chapter are why. To the teams behind them: thank you, sincerely. The invoice being near zero does not mean the value is.