I Deleted My Backend and Saved $48/year

Most side projects don't need a backend.
Mine definitely didn't.

Context

I have a webpage named TFT Double Up that finds the best compositions and pairs so players can coordinate their strategies without manually checking conflicts.

I did this project as a side project because I was playing with one friend and we did this manually by looking at the best pairs and trying to not have conflicts.

At first I created custom backend API hosted in Digital Ocean and when user asked opened the webpage I was returning the results and caching them for 1 day. You can see that code in these two lines of code:

@cache(expire=86400) if not settings.debug else (lambda f: f)
async def get_best_pairs(request: Request) -> JSONResponse:

I didn't play this very often, but it was still a useful webpage. Four dollars is not a lot, over 12 months it's 48 dollars, which was enough to make me think about finding a free alternative.

As each request was almost the same, only the data was changing from one day to the other, I thought about using GitHub actions.

I found in their documentation that: GitHub Actions usage is free for self-hosted runners and for public repositories that use standard GitHub-hosted runners. See Choosing the runner for a job.

As my API was basically a chron job I refactored the code to include a daily workflow and save it in a json file.

Key insight

All users were requesting the same data. The only thing changing was the dataset, which updated once per day. That meant my API was effectively acting as a cron job, not a real backend service.

Refactor

The refactor was quite simple, first of all I created a new file named daily_fetch.py to call the two functions and compare if the results are different from the previous day, if they are different change the current.json and create a new entry in the historic folder.

Secondly in the .github/workflows directory and to call the daily_fetch.py and push it to the data folder if there are differences. The only remarkable point you have to change is to allow Read and Write permissions in the settings/actions.

I also changed the FE to fetch the data from directly from the generated JSON then I turned off my Digital Ocean server and now I'm saving 4 dollars per month, which is not a lot but it was worth it as the change was not as big as I originally thought.

Architecture diagram

Before: User → Frontend → Backend (Digital Ocean) → Cache → API

After: GitHub Action (daily) → Generate JSON → commit to repo → Frontend fetches static data

When this works

This pattern works well when:

• Data changes infrequently

• Results are identical for all/most users

• Real time updates are not needed

Result

Before

• DigitalOcean - $4/month

• $48/year After

• GitHub actions - $0

If your backend only runs once per day, it's not really a backend.