I Built a Website for $2 (None of It Mine)

A $5 gift, a $2 sale, and a site that cost me nothing but questions.

The website you will never have to pay to visit cost me two dollars. Neither of them was mine.

The $5 gift

Vantage — the broker where I run my trading experiments — sent me a $5 Visa gift card. A promotion, a thank-you, whatever it was. Most people would have spent it on coffee.

I spent it on a website.

The $2 sale

IONOS was running a sale. Twelve months of hosting for $1. Domain Guard for $1. The domain itself — free for the first year. Two dollars total. I typed in the gift card number and watched the confirmation screen load.

Total from my own pocket: zero.

“The actual receipt. Two dollars, itemized.”

The AI built the rest

Here is the part that still feels strange to write. The website — shopdealai.com — every page, the deal boxes, the contact form, the privacy policy — was built by artificial intelligence. I asked. It wrote. I pointed. It deployed.

“shopdealai.com — the $2 website, live.”

The social channels followed. Then the deal engine: a small machine that finds discounted products and puts them in front of people who like a bargain. Built out of questions, the same way everything else I own was built.

No referral links in this story

Let me say this plainly, because it was a deliberate choice: there are no referral links in this article. Not for the broker, not for the hosting company.

In trading content, a referral link reads as a funnel. And I have spent this entire series trying to be the one voice that doesn’t funnel you anywhere. Referral links belong on the deal site itself, disclosed upfront — not smuggled into a story about learning.

So this part has nothing to click. That is the point.

Not to get rich

I didn’t build the site to get rich. I built it because a retired engineer with a computer is a dangerous thing to leave unsupervised — and because it is genuinely fun to own a machine that works while I sleep.

$2 total, none of it mine

That is the honest promo-year math, and it holds up. But every “$2 startup” story owes you the real invoice — what the renewals actually cost, what the other servers run, and what a year of 2 a.m. sessions was really worth. That comes next.

Your turn — I read every comment

1. What’s the cheapest thing you ever built that turned out to be worth real joy?
2. If someone handed you $2, what would you choose — one cup of coffee, or a whole new job: building a website?
3. Would you trust an AI to build your website end to end — or keep a hand on every page?

The best questions become material for the next parts.

Next: What It Actually Cost — the honest ledger.