A store that restocks and posts itself.

This page is the honest version of what that means: what the system actually does, what it runs on, what it cost, and what I did versus what the machine did. Every number here is checkable on the live sites — that's the point of publishing it.

• —days in a row published
• 120products kept live & rotating
• 13scheduled jobs running unattended
• $0per month to operate

The problem I was actually solving

Local businesses around here go quiet online. Not because owners don't care — because posting every day is a job nobody hired for. I noticed it first in my own store: I'd build something, promote it for a week, then work would swallow the time and the page would go still.

So instead of trying harder, I removed myself from the loop. If the posting can't depend on me remembering, it has to run without me.

What it does, unattended

• Restocks the storefront every three days Pulls the current trending catalog from the supplier's API, holds recently-shown items back so the shelf can't cycle between the same few products, prices every item above a floor that accounts for wholesale cost, worst-case shipping and payment fees, and republishes the site.
• Publishes a branded post every single day Generates the artwork and caption, archives it to a public feed, and bumps a counter that can't be fudged — it only increments on a genuinely new calendar day.
• Builds and delivers social packs Renders slide sets and pushes them into TikTok as drafts through the Content Posting API, with the captions sent to my phone to paste. Pinterest and X packs generate alongside.
• Takes payments and captures leads A Cloudflare Worker handles Stripe checkout, a lead form, per-IP abuse limits, and alerts to my phone — routed through a relay because the direct path gets rate-limited from shared cloud IPs.
• Watches itself Fourteen health checks run daily against the live sites; traffic reports land every three hours; a watchdog shouts if the proof feed or the catalog goes stale. Silence means healthy.

What it runs on

GitHub Actions for scheduling, GitHub Pages for hosting, a Cloudflare Worker with KV storage for payments and leads, Python for the engines, Stripe for money, GoatCounter for privacy-friendly analytics. Roughly 6,500 lines of Python across 28 modules and 13 scheduled workflows.

Operating cost: $0/month. Every piece sits inside a free tier on purpose — a pre-revenue business shouldn't have a burn rate.

What I did, and what the machine did

Worth being precise, because it's the interesting part. I did not hand-write those 6,500 lines. I designed the system, made every product and business decision, tested it, broke it, found the failures — the wallpaper, a stale claim on a slide, a scheduler that silently skipped three jobs in one morning — and decided how each one should be fixed. The code was written in partnership with an AI assistant, working from those decisions.

That's the skill I'd claim: not typing Python, but specifying a system precisely enough that it does the right thing unattended, then noticing when it doesn't. The failures above were all caught by looking, not by alerts.

What it's for

The store is one half. The other is East Coast Social — the same engine, pointed at local businesses so their pages post daily without them lifting a finger. The store is the proof it works: I ran it on myself first, in public, with a counter anyone can check.