How I Built a Zero-Cost, Auto-Updating Content Site for My Daily Word Game Addiction

The Problem I'm addicted to the NYT Spelling Bee. Every morning at 3 AM EST, a new puzzle drops. And every morning, I found myself googling "spelling bee answers today" — only to land on ad-ridden, slow-loading sites that felt like they were built in 2005. So I thought: How hard could it be to build something better? Turns out, not hard at all. Here's how I built spellingbeeanswers.xyz — a clean, fast, auto-updating answer site that costs me $0 and requires zero manual maintenance. The Stack (Keep It Simple) I didn't want to over-engineer this. The requirements were: ⚡ Fast load times 🔍 SEO-friendly 🤖 Zero manual updates 💰 Free hosting The stack: Frontend: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS (no framework, just speed) Data: Static JSON files (commit to repo) Automation: GitHub Actions + cron Hosting: Cloudflare Pages (unlimited bandwidth, global CDN) Analytics: Google Analytics 4 (free tier) The Architecture Instead of a backend server, I went fully static. Here's the flow: NYT publishes new puzzle ↓