The $0.74 Website: How Axoworks Replaced Its Storefront with an AI Agent
Axoworks Commentary | August 2026
$0.74. That is what surviving the Hacker News front page cost us. Total. But that is just cost accounting. Look back at New Year’s Day 2026 instead.
Google’s agent helps you reschedule a haircut. That is a demo of what ‘convenience’ looks like. The Concierge walks you through permit procedures for a 50-story skyscraper in Shanghai, in fluent Mandarin. No paywall. No corporate login. An open intelligent front door. That is a sea change.
People ask how a 2-person firm can possibly build this. That is the headcount fallacy talking. The real question: why are firms with 100x our budget moving like molasses? Is the headcount that once made firms untouchable starting to unravel in 2026?
The Concierge did not need 3 department directors and a steering committee of MBAs. It took 2 AEC veterans with 30 years on job sites and in permit offices, and the nerve to pivot when rules changed.
This is the story of that questionable experiment we call The Concierge.
The Problem
We were sick of click-browsing through 50-page websites and getting no answers. Pretty pictures and interesting graphics, sure… but spending 30 minutes hunting for a data sheet or spec that the web designer decided to exclude because it conflicted with the design aesthetics?
The question bugging us in 2025 was: can we build an AI conversational web storefront? More importantly, can the world adapt to and accept this UX shift?
No Brochure
On January 1, 2026, we killed our Wix brochure. A dumb $40/month static gallery, same as roughly 15 million other AEC firms currently on the web. We officially launched The Concierge.
Axoworks is small and lean by design: two founders, 30+yrs of AEC scar tissue each. We had sat on the other side of the phone. We know clients are sick of paying markups, sick of the Principal→PM→intern telephone game, sick of paying for headcount they never asked for. No fat, no luxuries. Competing in a saturated AEC sector on tight margins and minimal resources. We are the 95% of cash-strapped businesses out in the wild, not the deep pocket corporates and enterprises.
And we knew the ole phone routine: the same questions, every day, when the answers were already posted on the dumbass Wix website… if you could find them. Is everyone else also quietly suffering from browse-fatigue?
The tech was already sitting there. Open-weight AI, chatbots, Postgres, vibe coding, etc. The whole sector was piling onto the AI bandwagon. DeepSeek put a dent in Wall Street. Qwen was making stunning headway in generative AI. Slop was cluttering the web. The world had majorly flipped in 2025. AI became a commodity, and the Nobodies out there had cheap, mostly free, unfettered access.
The Design
Axoworks went into 2026 primed to explore a web UX paradigm shift. A ‘no-browse’ website. An agentic bot working as a real storefront sales manager: greets the user, talks intelligently, verifies live information from the web, pulls RAG data about our firm, and pesters the user for their contact info. It needed to be multilingual, and able to listen and respond in at least 4 languages.
End of 2025, we built The Concierge. Browsing is dead, or at least needs to die. We buried it.
Under The Hood
For the gearheads out there, The Concierge is a Single Page Application (SPA). At its core, a distributed agent loop split across 3 runtime boundaries to work around the host’s limits. Netlify kills serverless functions at 10 seconds; a real agent cannot think, search, and synthesize within that timeframe.
We split each user prompt into:
- The Brain (Netlify Edge) detects intent and decides what work needs to happen.
- The Hands (your browser) trigger the tools: search, email, scheduling.
- The Voice (Netlify Edge) streams the final answer.
To improve UX response time, we implemented an “Eager RAG” layer that pre-fetches project context before the Brain kicks in. First token lands in under a second.
The agent speaks English, Chinese, Spanish, and French for the likely Axoworks customer demographics, but also any language the model comprehends, for the outliers.
It runs 2 personas: a warm principal for real customers, a defensive bulldog for peers who come to fight and abuse the system.
The ‘principal’ was not fabricated out of thin air. We had spent decades being that person. It needed to carry our voice: knowing when to stop talking, not over-promising, no BS, anticipating what the customer actually wants.
Building the chassis was the easy part. Fine-tuning the persona and guardrails was not. It took 2.5 months to tune the tone, plus ongoing monitoring for guardrails and vulnerabilities.
The $0.74 Stress Test
We shipped it as a Show HN. This was the real stress test, conducted by tech insiders.
- 6,300 pageviews in a 6-hour window
- #2 on the HN front page for a few hours
- Total AI hosting cost: $0.74
The 30-day post-mortem: 17,401 pageviews, 5,084 unique global visitors, 631 MB of bandwidth. All served off Netlify Edge Functions. No rented server. No CMS. No $40/mo brochure extortion.
The Landmines We Defused
The 10-second wall. DeepSeek-V3.2-chat, tool calls, and synthesis could not finish inside Netlify’s 10-second timeout. So we split the agent across 3 boundaries instead of renting a bigger server.
The SEO paradox. An agentic SPA is invisible to Google’s crawlers, which were built for the 1990s. Our domain had only 1 URL in our sitemap. Google wasn’t interested. So we built logs.axoworks.com: 78 crawlable records, 67 URLs, cross-referenced from our robots.txt. A dirty, asymmetrical, guerrilla bridge between our AI storefront and yesteryear’s Google.
The liability wall. “Hallucinate a building code clause? We’re dead. Insurance won’t touch us.” Every answer is grounded, verified, and human-accountable.
The red team. Hacker News found the PII in our raw RAG dumps. We scrubbed in real time as the HN community kept attacking. They found the bulldog persona too aggressive; we dialed it back. 48 comments, 7 documented fixes, multiple real-time refactors, zero excuses… and one too many cups of coffee.
A final AI Hostile Audit scored the system 8.625/10. Production-grade CSRF protection, rate limiting, and exponential backoff. The critical gap: no server-side job queue. We know. It’s on our To-do list.
The Verdict
Websites today require that you quietly ‘browse’ in awe and maybe find an answer. The Concierge engages you in conversations, multimodal, in any language.
We replaced the curated brochure with a dynamic terminal, and the static browsing with real conversations.
30 years of scar tissue, 2 founders, and a $0.74 bill. That is not a chatbot… that is a firm with the grit to define ‘tomorrow’.
Tiny is Mighty. Believe it!
The full technical postmortem lives on Substack: From Portfolio to Agent.
As we ask in our 3-Dog Theory: are you running a shelter, or are you part of an elite unit?
Talk to The Concierge at axoworks.com.