We Replaced Squarespace in 2 Hours for $0/Month

Meta Description: We used Claude Code to replace our Squarespace site with Cloudflare Pages in under 2 hours. Zero dependencies, zero monthly cost, $396/year saved.

Our Squarespace site cost us $33/month. It was a fine website. Clean. Professional. But maintaining it meant logging into a visual editor, fighting with layout blocks, and paying a subscription for what was essentially a single landing page.

So we replaced the whole thing in one Claude Code session. Under 2 hours. Monthly cost: $0.

The Problem: Paying $396/Year for a Page We Rarely Update

Here’s the honest math. Squarespace Business plan: $33/month. That’s $396/year. For a one-page website that we update maybe once a quarter.

Our blog already lives on GitHub Pages (Astro, free). Our enrollment form runs on Cloudflare Workers (free tier). The only thing on Squarespace was the main landing page — About, Training, Labs, Contact. Four sections. One page.

We were paying $33/month for a visual editor we didn’t need for a page that barely changes. That’s not a smart use of money when you’re building in public and watching every dollar.

The Prompt: One Modified Template, One Session

Here’s how little effort this actually took on our end.

Anthropic publishes a Website Wizard prompt in their prompt library. We grabbed it, modified it to say “scrape our existing site for look, feel, and content,” and pasted it in. That was the entire starting instruction.

Claude Code scraped our Squarespace pages — about, training, blog — extracted the copy, understood the branding, and started building. We didn’t write a design spec. We didn’t create wireframes. We didn’t pick colors manually. The AI read our actual site and used it as the foundation.

From there, the revisions were minimal. Short, conversational nudges:

• “Make it say AI-first company.” Done.
• “Change the last module to AI Builder.” Done.
• “Labs should link to the labs page, not just the blog.” Done.
• “Course is coming soon, not sure on price yet.” Done.

Each change took seconds. Total human input across the entire session: maybe a dozen short sentences. The rest was Claude Code building, deploying, debugging, and iterating on its own.

What Claude Code Built (With Almost No Direction)

One HTML file. Everything embedded — CSS, JavaScript, all of it. No build step. No node_modules. No framework. No dependencies.

What came out of that single modified prompt:

• Dark/light mode toggle with localStorage persistence (matching our blog’s theme system)
• Responsive design with mobile hamburger nav
• Smooth scroll navigation between sections
• Scroll-reveal animations using IntersectionObserver
• CSS custom properties for the entire color system — neon green (#00ff88) in dark mode, emerald (#059669) in light mode

The sections: Hero, About (with our 4 pillars), Training (AI-1001 coming soon), Labs (always free), Blog Preview, Contact, and Footer with the classic “we come in peace” marquee.

Step 3: Dynamic Blog Feed (20 minutes)

We wanted the homepage to show our latest blog posts. Problem: our Astro blog doesn’t have an RSS feed.

Claude Code’s solution: a Cloudflare Pages Function — a serverless endpoint at /api/blog-feed that fetches our blog homepage, parses the HTML for post titles and descriptions, and returns clean JSON. The homepage JavaScript fetches this on load and populates two dynamic blog cards. If the API fails, it falls back to hardcoded posts.

// Pages Function: fetches blog, parses posts, returns JSON
export async function onRequest(context) {
  const response = await fetch("https://blog.alienbraintrust.ai");
  const html = await response.text();
  // Parse <li> elements with regex, return JSON
  // ...
}

Total serverless infrastructure for dynamic content: one 51-line JavaScript file.

Step 4: Deploy to Cloudflare Pages (15 minutes)

Claude Code ran wrangler pages deploy from the terminal. First attempt deployed the static site but missed the function (turns out you need to run wrangler from inside the output directory for Pages Functions to compile). Fixed in the same session. Second deploy: “Compiled Worker successfully. Uploading Functions bundle.”

Site live at alienbraintrust.pages.dev within minutes.

Step 5: DNS Flip (30 minutes)

This was the only part that required our hands on a keyboard (sort of).

Claude Code checked our Cloudflare account, identified the zone, and walked us through:

1. Move nameservers from Namecheap to Cloudflare (free)
2. Wait for propagation
3. Add alienbraintrust.ai as a custom domain on the Pages project

It even diagnosed the www subdomain still pointing to Squarespace (the crumb cookie in response headers gave it away) and told us exactly which DNS record to fix.

Total human effort for DNS: clicking through two dashboards and waiting for propagation.

What We Shipped

Feature	Before (Squarespace)	After (Cloudflare Pages)
Monthly cost	$33	$0
Annual cost	$396	$0
Build step	Squarespace editor	None (static HTML)
Dependencies	Squarespace platform	Zero
Dark/light mode	No	Yes
Dynamic blog feed	No	Yes (serverless function)
Deploy process	Visual editor → publish	git push (or wrangler CLI)
Page speed	Good	Excellent (no framework overhead)
Vendor lock-in	High	None (it’s an HTML file)

The Real Numbers

• Time to build and deploy: Under 2 hours
• Lines of HTML/CSS/JS: ~1,237 (single file, all embedded)
• Lines of serverless code: 51 (blog feed function)
• External dependencies: 0
• Monthly hosting cost: $0
• Annual savings: $396
• Build step: None

The site is a single HTML file. You can open it in any browser, on any computer, right now. No npm install. No build. No framework updates to worry about. If Cloudflare Pages disappeared tomorrow, we’d drag the file to any static host and be live in minutes.

What This Actually Proves

This isn’t a “look how cool AI is” story. This is a practical cost-reduction and maintenance-reduction exercise.

We had a recurring expense for a simple need. An AI coding assistant helped us eliminate that expense in a single work session. The output is simpler, faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain than what it replaced.

Here’s what Claude Code actually did that saved us time:

1. Read our existing content so we didn’t have to manually spec everything
2. Iterated in real-time — each content tweak was conversational, not “save, preview, adjust, save again”
3. Handled the deployment plumbing — wrangler CLI, DNS diagnostics, function debugging
4. Debugged its own work — when the blog feed regex didn’t match the actual HTML, it fetched the blog, analyzed the structure, and fixed the regex in the same session

Could we have done this without AI? Absolutely. But it would’ve taken a weekend, not 2 hours. And we probably would’ve reached for a framework, added a build step, and created something harder to maintain than what we started with.

The real unlock: we didn’t have to know how to build a website. We started with a modified prompt template, pointed it at our existing site, and gave a dozen one-sentence corrections along the way. That’s it. The AI handled the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript, the serverless function, the deployment, and the DNS debugging.

For Anyone Still Paying for a Landing Page

If your website is a landing page — about, services, contact — you probably don’t need a $33/month platform. You might not even need a framework.

What you need:

• One HTML file with embedded CSS and JS
• A free static host (Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, Netlify)
• An AI coding assistant to build it for you if you’re not a developer

The barrier isn’t technical skill anymore. The barrier is knowing that this option exists.

What’s Next

The Squarespace subscription gets cancelled this week. That’s $396/year back in the budget — which, coincidentally, is roughly what we spend on AI tool subscriptions that actually generate value every single day.

The new site is live at alienbraintrust.ai. Same content, same brand, same alien vibes. Just faster, simpler, and free.

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We used Claude Code (Anthropic’s CLI coding assistant) for this entire project. The site, the serverless function, the deployment, the DNS debugging — all in one conversational session. This is what we mean by AI-first: using AI not as a novelty, but as a practical tool that saves real time and real money.