You Can Build a Website for Less Than a Dinner at Chili's

I have tried a few times to build my own website. In college, my capstone project was to build a website from scratch. It took me an entire semester and to be honest, it sucked. I tried again a few years back, but kept getting bogged down by the myriad difficulties of DNS, SSL, formatting, content management, hosting, etc., etc.

So Easy an IT guy could do it

The emergence of agentic coding tools like Claude Code and Codex have demolished those technical barriers to entry. What took weeks of strategizing, debugging, and reading documentation now takes a couple hours of back-and-forth in a terminal. It becomes less about technical decisions and more about design and functionality.

Despite taking many coding classes, I could never imagine myself as a developer. It all seemed too overwhelming. After I finished my CS degree, I barely even considered applying for a software dev role. It was beyond imposter syndrome; I figured my chances of becoming a professional dev were about as good as me playing in the NBA.

I now feel empowered to turn my ideas into software. The tools are now at a point where anyone with a functional knowledge of how to use a computer can build software too.

How I Made This

This site was entirely written by Claude Code and published to my personal Github. It took about 45 minutes from sitting down at my keyboard and cracking a White Monster® to having a working prototype hosted on github pages. Another hour or so after purchasing my domain it was live at noahbrown.io. While DNS was propagating, I wrote this article.

Claude walked me through the pros and cons of different tech stacks, asked me questions about the design and layout that I wanted, and came up with a solid implementation plan to create it. To add articles to my blog, all I need to do is drop markdown files into the right folder and push the changes to my github repository. If that last sentence sounds too complicated for you, I promise it is not. Your AI agent of choice can walk you through everything.

Selecting Requirements — Claude lets me make the design decisions.

How much did it cost?

All in this cost me:

$20 for the Claude Pro subscription
$12.99 for the domain noahbrown.io
2 hours of my time

Easily cheaper than a dinner at Chili’s. Though I would rather have a triple-dipper than a website 10 times out of 9.

What this taught me about B2B SaaS Sales

There has been a lot of talk recently about the long term viability of the big SaaS companies in a future where anyone can spin up a customized piece of software that can get the job done for much less money and with much more control. I am still pretty skeptical of that coming very soon, considering how most companies are still so slow to embrace AI in the workplace and the deadly combo of sheer complexity and business criticality that things like ERP and CRM systems have.

However, I am starting to see glimpses of a future where you buy less software, and don’t need to use a glorified templating service like wordpress or squarespace to build a website. Why would I do that when I can just spend a morning building it myself?