I don't really code. Since July, Claude Code and I have built two live collection-tracker sites that cost $7 a month to run.

In July I wanted a better way to track my Magic: The Gathering collection, so I opened Claude Code and started describing what I wanted. I've used it a lot at work, but decided to pull the trigger on a Pro account. Three and a half months later there are two sites, both free, no ads: tcg.brothermo.com tracks Magic, Disney Lorcana and Pokémon (English and Japanese). Set checklists, daily prices, price history charts per card, card search across all four games. vgc.brothermo.com tracks retro video game collections: every physical copy with box/manual checkmarks and condition, plus consoles, accessories and old magazines. What surprised me most was after the initial framework was done, asking it for improvements. I'm not the most creative because I don't know what you can and cannot do. But by having it give me X number of suggestions, now it does a smoke-test suite that runs before every deploy, offline support so the app works in a card shop with no signal, nightly database backups to my NAS (plus the code and server settings after every deploy), rate limiting, three rounds of security review, and an admin dashboard with a security page and server upkeep checks that emails me a daily digest. What I did: Wrote the spec in plain English and made every decision. Claude asks before it changes anything. Tested every change on a preview copy with fake data before it went live. Ran the server commands myself. Claude writes them and explains them; I paste them. What it costs: about $6–7 a month for a Hetzner server and $11 a year for the domain. Everything else is free: Flask, SQLite, and free card data from Scryfall, Lorcast and TCGdex. About 20 people use the card site so far. If you collect, I'd love feedback, and I'm happy to answer questions about how this went for someone without a coding background.