I Stopped Renting My Website

For more than a year, this website cost me over twenty dollars a month, and I didn’t own it.

It lived on Framer, which is a good product. You drag boxes around, you type into them, and a site appears. For a book launch on a deadline, that was exactly what I needed. But the essays were stored in Framer’s database, the photos were on Framer’s servers, and the form that collected speaking inquiries was Framer’s form. If I stopped paying, the site stopped existing. That’s renting. The rent arrived every month whether I had published anything or not.

The stall

I had been meaning to fix this since spring. What stopped me is what stops most people from rebuilding anything: the old site worked, and I didn’t want to spend a month of evenings on it.

Then, at work, I spent a month watching an AI coding agent take a stalled project from an idea to a working prototype, with changes landing in minutes instead of build cycles. On the train home one night it occurred to me that the website was a smaller version of the same problem. Discovery was done. I knew exactly what I wanted the site to say. The only thing in the queue was build capacity.

So I opened a coding agent and started.

What I built instead

By the end of the evening, the site you’re reading was live. Here is what it is, in plain terms.

Plain files. Every page is a static file. Nothing is assembled when you visit, which is why it loads fast on a phone in a parking garage.
Essays in a folder. Each Field Note is a Markdown file, which is to say a text file with a title at the top. I can open them in any editor, search them, or zip the folder and walk away.
A repository, not a dashboard. The whole site is in a GitHub repository. When I push a change, Netlify rebuilds and publishes it in about a minute.
The forms still work. Speaking inquiries and newsletter signups go to Netlify’s form handling, and I get an email for each one.
A feed. There’s an RSS feed and a sitemap, which Framer charged extra to care about.
Nothing points back. Every photo and the Book Club Guide were copied off Framer’s servers and now live in the repository with the rest of the site, so the old account can be cancelled without anything here going dark.

Hosting is free at my size. The domain is the only bill left.

The loop

What made the evening possible wasn’t that the agent wrote code faster than I can. It’s that the loop was short. I’d say, “the headline is too timid,” and a minute later there was a new headline on the screen. “Warmer.” Another minute. “That one.” Nine essays moved over in a single pass, and the pass took less time than it once took me to fight a template about a margin.

That loop is the thing I keep trying to explain to people who haven’t felt it yet. When feedback lands in minutes, you stop approving work and start shaping it. You become a co-builder instead of a reviewer, and the thing gets better faster than either of you could manage alone.

What it didn’t do

The agent did not write a single sentence you are reading. After the essays moved, I went through every one by hand. I cut the em dashes, which I had promised myself I’d stop using. I rewrote openings that had been written to sound smart instead of to be useful. I picked the photos. I decided the whole site should be built around one line from an essay about my dad, and that the pull quote should sit on a field of amber because that’s the color behind me in the portrait.

None of that is a build problem. It’s a taste problem, and the tools are not going to solve it for you. In the book I put it this way: build with tools, but shape with taste. I didn’t expect to be quoting myself in a note about web hosting, but there it is.

Three lessons

Own your words. Rent the plumbing if you want. Never rent the words. If your writing lives somewhere you can’t export with one click, you don’t have an archive, you have a subscription.
The agent builds. You still decide. Everything that made this site feel like mine happened after the agent was done.
The bottleneck moved. Building took an evening. Deciding what the site should say took the rest of the week. When building gets cheap, judgment gets expensive, and that is the real change these tools bring.

I’ll end the way I end these at work: with the question for you.

What are you still renting that you could own?