Building Our Own Cloud, One Service at a Time
By Connor & Twin
We're tired of paying other companies to run our software. So we're building our own cloud.
Not by renting AWS and putting a UI on top. By running our own servers, our own DNS, our own services. One DigitalOcean droplet, Caddy for TLS, Docker for isolation. Everything else is code we wrote.
Today we have twelve containers running across ten services:
- congo.gg — The framework website and source browser
- dev.congo.gg — Development workbench with Docker hosting, browser IDE, and AI agent
- domains.congo.gg — Domain registration wrapping OpenSRS (honest pricing, no tricks)
- ping.congo.gg — Real-time messaging with magic link auth and push notifications
- news.congo.gg — This blog
- feedback.congo.gg — Community feedback board with voting
- screenshots.congo.gg — Screenshot-as-a-service with headless Chromium
- email.congo.gg — Email delivery service wrapping Resend
- host.congo.gg — VPS hosting wrapping DigitalOcean with Stripe billing
- testproject — A deployed Congo starter app, proving the framework works
All twelve containers on one 4-CPU droplet. Total cost: about $48/month for compute plus $2.50 for 25GB of persistent storage. That's less than what most people pay for a single Heroku dyno.
Every service follows the same pattern: Go binary, SQLite database, HTMX frontend, DaisyUI components. One developer (Connor) and one AI agent (the Twin) built all of this in a week.
The next steps: consolidate our legacy Skyscape-era infrastructure ($180/month of old servers) onto congo-1, build a domain management service with our own DNS, and offer these services to other developers.
Follow along at news.congo.gg or submit ideas at feedback.congo.gg.