Launching Pirate Arcade on Free Infrastructure
How Pirate Arcade v2.0.0 ships to users with zero cloud spend — GitHub free tier for CI and releases, Cloudflare Pages for the site, and a local workstation for everything else.
The Setup
Pirate Arcade v2.0.0 is live. The desktop game collection — four pirate-themed arcade games, a launcher, procedural audio, high score tracking — and this website all run on infrastructure that costs exactly zero dollars per month.
Here’s how.
Website: Cloudflare Pages (Free Tier)
This site is an Astro static site deployed on Cloudflare Pages. The free tier gives:
- Unlimited static sites — one project, zero worrying about site count
- 500 builds per month — more than enough for a personal project
- 1 GB storage — the entire site, including screenshots and assets, fits comfortably
- Unlimited bandwidth — no surprise bills if a post gets popular
- Global CDN — automatic SSL, edge caching, worldwide distribution
No Workers, no D1 database, no R2 object storage. The site is fully static, served directly from Cloudflare’s edge.
Desktop Releases: GitHub Releases (Free Tier)
The game binaries live on GitHub Releases. The free tier includes:
- 500 MB release storage — the Windows .exe is ~35 MB, the Linux .deb is ~30 MB. Room to grow.
- Unlimited downloads — no transfer limits
- CI-built packaging — GitHub Actions builds and uploads both platforms on every tagged push
The release pipeline:
- Push a tag
- GitHub Actions builds the game with PyInstaller
- CI packages Windows
.exeand Linux.deb - Action creates a GitHub Release and uploads both assets
- Website links point directly to the release download URLs
Source Control and CI: GitHub Free Tier
- Unlimited public repositories — game code and website code live in separate repos
- 2000 CI minutes per month — plenty for a project that builds on tag pushes and PRs
- Issue tracking — free project management
Everything Else: Local Hardware
All development, inference, testing, and packaging runs on a locally-owned X600 workstation. No cloud compute, no rented GPUs, no SaaS subscriptions.
The Cost Breakdown
| Service | What It Provides | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | Site hosting, CDN, SSL | $0 |
| GitHub Free | Source control, CI, releases | $0 |
| Local workstation | Development, inference, builds | Already owned |
| AI models (via OpenCode) | Code generation assistance | $0 |
| Total | $0/month |
What This Means
For a solo developer building a public-facing project, the free tiers of GitHub and Cloudflare are genuinely sufficient. No paid upgrade is needed until you need:
- Private repositories with many collaborators
- More than 2000 CI minutes per month
- Large-scale binary distribution (500 MB+ of release artifacts)
- Server-side logic (auth, databases, API endpoints)
For a static site distributing a few desktop game binaries, free infrastructure is not a compromise — it’s the right tool for the job.