Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 (you are here) Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets The Pi on the Desk I had a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) sitting on my desk running Debian trixie. It was serving as an occasional dev box, but mostly collecting dust. Meanwhile, I was paying Comcast for a gateway that doubled as a mediocre WiFi router. The gateway WiFi was fine for my wife’s devices, but I started thinking: what if I ran my own router? ...

Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel (you are here) Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets What Was Left After the Static Site Migration After moving all static sites to Cloudflare Pages, the only thing left going through the DigitalOcean App Platform and Load Balancer was n8n – my workflow automation tool at automation.shellnetsecurity.com. ...

Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages (you are here) Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets The Problem: 5 Hops to Serve Static HTML As I covered in Part 1, my static websites were going through an absurd pipeline: ...

Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call (you are here) Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets The Moment I Noticed I’ve been running everything in DigitalOcean since I decided to ditch my home equipment years ago. The appeal was “set it and forget it” – no hardware failures at 2 AM, no power outages taking down my sites, no maintaining physical boxes. And for years, it worked. My bill hovered around $125/month and I didn’t think twice about it. ...

Most security monitoring tools rely on server-side logs or cloud-native telemetry. But what happens when the client is opaque? When a mobile app, a single-page application (SPA), or a proprietary service is behaving in ways the server doesn’t fully document, you need a way to look at the wire directly. This post also marks the beginning of a new experiment: The Rabbit Hole Series. Every Friday, a “Rabbit Hole Generator” I built (which I later took apart in its own post) spits out a new technical topic for me to explore for 30 minutes. This week, the generator gave me mitmproxy. ...