Own your domain, site and inbox for under $20 a year

Conclusion: to be findable, reachable and memorable as a maker you need exactly three things — your own domain, a free-hosted site, and an inbox on that domain. The only hard cost is the domain: about US$10 a year. Everything else fits inside free tiers.

Why the marketplace shop is not enough

The marketplaces are not bad; the problem is that nothing there belongs to you. Rules, fees, traffic allocation, search ranking — any of them can change and you must follow. A domain is the only asset that is still in your name ten years later.

“In essence we gather people with the same need together, so we do not have to advertise to find orders — the orders find us.” — from my own notes (redacted)

That line is about the power of a platform; it works in reverse too: your site is your own demand-aggregation point. When a buyer searches “handmade ceramic mug” and lands on your page instead of a listing grid, that click is finally yours.

Three steps, in order

Step 1 — buy a domain (~US$10/year)

• Where: Cloudflare Registrar (at-cost, no first-year gimmicks, no renewal hikes), or any registrar you trust.
• What: name + .com is the stable choice. If the budget is tight you can take a cheaper suffix, but know the cost: lower trust by default and worse email deliverability.
• Do this: turn on auto-renew and set a calendar reminder. Letting a domain lapse and get re-registered is the most expensive mistake in this whole process.
• What you will see: a DNS settings page. Touch nothing yet.

Step 2 — put a site online (free)

• Use Cloudflare Pages: connect a folder of static files (or a GitHub repo), build once, get a URL.
• In the Pages project add Custom domains → your domain. It writes DNS and issues the certificate for you.
• What you will see: the domain moves from Initializing to Active / SSL enabled, and https://yourdomain opens.
• Keep the site simple at first: one page of who I am, what I make, how to reach me, plus a works list. Do not start with a full store.

Step 3 — a real inbox on that domain (free)

• In Cloudflare open Email Routing, add a destination (your Gmail), verify once.
• Turn on a catch-all rule: everything at *@yourdomain forwards to that inbox.
• What you will see: MX, SPF and DKIM records appear automatically.
• Result: hello@yourdomain and orders@yourdomain both receive mail while your actual inbox stays Gmail. Configure send-mail-as in Gmail when you want to reply from the domain.

Cost table (your checkout price wins)

Item	Cost	Note
Domain	≈ US$10/year	The only hard cost; at-cost renewal does not jump
Static hosting	0	Free tier is far beyond a personal site
HTTPS certificate	0	Issued and renewed automatically
Email forwarding	0	Catch-all into your existing inbox
Site tooling	0	Hand-written HTML or a static generator

Three mistakes to skip

1. Build the store first, content later. Backwards. Buyers find you before they buy you; build the findable page first.
2. Any cheap domain will do, nobody looks. The domain is your street address. Picking a bad suffix is writing the address on a scrap of paper.
3. I will do it when I am better at tech. None of these three steps needs tech. They need one afternoon.

The judgement to take away

“Luxury never disappears — because what is luxurious is not efficiency but scarcity: the value a person endows.” — from my own notes (redacted)

Handmade never sold efficiency. It sold who made it, why, and why others cannot. Your own site is where that endowment gets fixed in place: works sell out, pages do not.