willow-camp

How Much does it Cost to Run willow.camp?

Cassia Scheffer

21 Sep 2025 — 1 min read

I recently enabled image uploads in the marksmith text editor on willow.camp. I’ve been hesitant to add media management to willow.camp for two reasons: it is hard to get the user experience right, media management adds extra cost.

I am being cost-conscious on willow.camp because it doesn’t make any money. This is a passion project, and I’m having lots of fun doing it. But the more fun I have, the more it might cost.

It turns out adding storage is way cheaper than I thought. I would have to have a whole lot of media and a few really busy willow.camp sites to start getting charged more for data transfer fees.

I will eventually build a pricing plan for willow.camp to cover costs for active sites. In the meantime, if you want to support willow.camp, you can send me a tip on https://ko-fi.com/cassiascheffer.

Claude Code

I include Claude Code in here because it is part of my development process. I’m on the Max plan, and I use it enough that it pays off.

In the past 30 days, I’ve used CAD $188.49 of tokens, and I even took a week off in the woods.

I use Claude Code to scaffold ideas, experiment with features, and improve test coverage. I’ve been able to build willow.camp so quickly because Claude Code is pretty good at scaffolding a blog in Rails.

August Breakdown

DigitalOcean Droplet (1 vcpu, 1 gb memory) $8.25

DigitalOcean Postgres ( 1gb ram, 10 gb disk) $20.82

Hatchbox.io Deployments $14.13

Claude Code Max $158.2

Honeybadger Error Tracking $0

Total $201.40

Total without Claude Code $43.20

September Estimate

Here is my estimate for September based on today’s exchange rate.

DigitalOcean Droplet (1 vCPU, 1 GB memory) $8.26

DigitalOcean Postgres ( 1 GB RAM, 10 GB disk) $20.87

DigitalOcean Spaces (half a month) $3.44

Hatchbox.io Deployments $14.13

Claude Code Max $192.84

Honeybadger Error Tracking $0

Total $239.54

Total without Claude Code $46.7

Safe Claude Code Settings

Here are a few commands I have in my Claude Code deny-list to prevent bad things from happening. I wish Claude shipped with these by default! The following commands disallow Claude from force pushing and skipping pre-commit hooks. { "permissions": { "deny": [ "Bash(git push -f)"

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After a week of experimenting with using git and jj to plan and build, I’ve landed on jj as the winner. Rebasing Kills the Git Workflow Automatic rebases are the winning feature here. When I tell Claude to update a change, it will automatically rebase all its descendants. This

Use Git to Plan and Build With Claude

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