Everything we run, including client sites, our own products and a team of AI agents, runs on one server in Auckland. It costs about NZ$22 a month in electricity. A comparable cloud server in the AWS or Azure New Zealand regions was priced at roughly NZ$1,681 to NZ$2,868 a month. Here is the honest version of that comparison.
What runs on it
On 15 October 2026 the server was running 104 services and 80 scheduled automations: websites, databases, our AI agents, monitoring, a messaging gateway and the Studio. It sits behind Cloudflare tunnels, so it has no open inbound ports, and Cloudflare caches pages around the world.
What the cloud buys you
Redundancy. A cloud provider has spare hardware in another building; we have spare hardware on a shelf. Our server has had outages: a power cable in August, an out-of-memory incident caused by one runaway agent session, and a hardware failure on 5 October that we recovered from the same evening. If your business cannot tolerate an hour of downtime, pay for the cloud.
What owning it buys you
- Cost: the saving pays for a lot of engineering time
- Control: we know exactly where data lives and who can reach it
- Room to experiment: running an extra service costs nothing
- No per-seat or per-request surprises
What we did about the risk
Off-site encrypted backups, a monitor that checks 64 sites every two minutes, a watchdog on the network link, an off-site uptime check that texts a person, and edge caching so many pages keep serving even while the origin is down. None of that makes it perfect. It makes failures short.
We host client sites the same way, from $49 a month. See hosting and care.