Netlify

Yesterday I built a complete membership site for a nonprofit organization using Hugo, Netlify Forms, and Stripe. The entire stack cost $0/month and deployed in under 2 hours. Here’s how it works and why this stack is underrated. The Stack Hugo (static site generator) + Netlify (hosting + forms) + Stripe (payments) Cost: $0/month (Netlify free tier: 100 form submissions/month) Performance: Instant page loads (static HTML) Complexity: Low (no database, no backend server) Deployment: Auto-deploy from GitHub Why This Stack? The organization needed: ...

We started deploying a Hugo site to GitHub Pages yesterday. CSS wouldn’t load. Images were broken. Path issues everywhere. Switched to Netlify. Everything worked immediately. Here’s why. The GitHub Pages Problem GitHub Pages is free and works great for simple static sites. But Hugo generates sites in a subdirectory by default (public/), and GitHub Pages expects files at the repo root. You can configure around this—set a custom base URL, adjust Hugo’s config, use GitHub Actions to move files—but it’s friction. ...

Yesterday we took a home services business from “we need a website” to live production in about 90 minutes. Not a landing page. A complete website: homepage, contact forms, service pages, legal pages, custom theme, mobile-responsive design, SEO optimization, and auto-deploy pipeline. Here’s what that looked like. The Stack Hugo for the static site generator. Fast, simple, no database needed. Netlify for hosting and deployment. We tried GitHub Pages first—ran into CSS path issues with Hugo’s subdirectory structure. Switched to Netlify and everything just worked. ...