I'm an expat living in El Pescadero in Southern Baja, Mexico, and I wanted a local site with the weather, the news and some humor, and the challenge was to make it self-running. Every hour a scheduler pulls local news, weather, earthquake and storm data. An AI model writes the satire and a daily quote with an appropriate image, and a newsletter goes out every Tuesday morning without me touching it. The one thing I still have to do by hand is local Facebook events, when I get around to it. Under the hood it's a small Python and SQLite app on a single VPS, which runs about $3.00 a month, and I use a Gemini API, mostly older LLM versions in batch mode, for usually around $6-7.00 a month. I have Mailchimp to handle emails and Stripe to handle the very occasional donation, so that works out to about another $2.00 a month or so. All in, it costs me roughly $12 a month, max. Too bad nobody uses it! Would love some ideas for getting more engagement. Happy to talk about the setup or what broke along the way. The site is thepeskytoad.com if you're curious.   submitted by   /u/TelephoneOk3485 [link]   [comments]