How we built this website with AI in one day (and what it costs to run)
7 July 2026
This website is our proof of work. We sell AI systems to businesses, so the first test was obvious: could an AI build our own website, end to end, in one working day? It could. Here is exactly how it went, with real numbers and the parts that went wrong.
What we started with
A domain name bought at GoDaddy, a MacBook, and an AI coding agent (Claude Code). No hosting, no code, no designer, no email, not even a logo.
What the AI actually did
Over one day, the AI:
- Set up the code, the hosting pipeline, and the publishing system, so every change goes live automatically
- Registered the domain’s settings, connected it to the hosting, and set up HTTPS
- Built every page you’re reading now, mobile-first, and tested each one at three screen sizes
- Wrote the first draft of every line of copy on this site
- Set up our business email on our own domain, including the technical records that keep it out of spam folders
- Connected the contact form and the newsletter, then tested both by actually submitting them and checking the results
- Designed the logo you see in the header (we picked our favourite from three options it proposed)
- Audited the finished site with Google’s Lighthouse tool: it scores 99 to 100 out of 100 on performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO
What still needed a human
This is the part most AI marketing skips, so here it is honestly:
- Every word was approved by a person before it went live. The AI drafts, we decide. Several drafts were changed or rejected.
- Money and accounts. Buying the domain and email plan, creating accounts, and every login and payment stayed in human hands. The AI is deliberately locked out of all of that.
- Business decisions. What services to offer, what the brand should feel like, whether to show pricing (we chose not to). An AI shouldn’t invent your business.
What it costs to run
| Item | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Hosting (Cloudflare Pages) | RM0 |
| Contact form (Web3Forms) | RM0 |
| Newsletter, up to 2,500 subscribers (EmailOctopus) | RM0 |
| Booking calendar (Calendly) | RM0 |
| Business email (Microsoft 365 Business Basic, USD45.36 billed yearly) | ≈RM16 |
| Domain, protection and extras (GoDaddy, RM151.93 billed yearly) | ≈RM13 |
| Total | ≈RM29 |
There is no web developer retainer, no CMS licence, and nothing that needs patching at midnight. A static site on managed hosting has no moving parts: nothing runs, so nothing crashes.
What surprised us
- The internet is not built for AI visitors yet. Cloudflare’s own dashboard blocked our AI’s browser as a suspected bot (fair enough, it was one), so the AI switched to doing everything through official APIs instead, which turned out to be faster and more reliable anyway.
- An invisible cookie banner once froze an entire dashboard. The AI found it by reading the page’s code, dismissed it, and moved on. A human would have stared at a spinning logo.
- The accessibility audit caught a real flaw. One shade of grey text was slightly too light against a tinted background. Fixed in one line, and the kind of detail human teams ship unnoticed all the time.
What this means for your business
The point was never the website. The point is that the same approach, an AI doing the repetitive skilled work while humans make the decisions, applies to your customer enquiries, your bookings, and your paperwork. If a full website takes a day, ask what your most time-consuming process would take.
That conversation is free: book a 30-minute consultation and we’ll tell you honestly whether AI is worth your money.
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