What a one-person software shop runs on

I run Aleluya Technologies on a 7-year-old Macbook Air, a 500-euro mini-PC, and a Claude subscription.

That’s most of the production stack. There’s some plumbing around it, which I’ll get to, but the load-bearing parts of the setup cost less than a single month’s salary at the kind of job I gave up applying for in March. The constraint is the design. A shop that can run on this hardware can run anywhere, which matters when the work is spread across three countries and a fixed office is not a useful concept.

The hardware that survived

The laptop is a Macbook Air M1, bought in 2019, refused replacement.

It still does the job. The M1 chip was the first piece of Apple silicon that genuinely held up under sustained engineering load, and seven years later the same machine still compiles, still runs the browser tabs, still drives the meetings. The battery is no longer original. The keyboard has a key that sticks sometimes. The screen has one stuck pixel that I notice once a quarter and then forget. None of this affects whether the work ships.

The second piece is a mini-PC, 32 GB of RAM, picked up in Spain for 500 euros earlier this year. It runs Linux. It lives wherever I happen to be set up, plugged into a wall and a router, doing nothing visible but doing it constantly. It’s the always-on half of the stack. The laptop comes and goes. The mini-PC stays awake.

That’s the hardware. Two machines. One that travels, one that doesn’t.

The software that does the lifting

Claude is the load-bearing tool.

It’s in the loop on almost every workflow. Drafting Postgres schemas. Writing the n8n node configurations. Refactoring a React tree that grew unmaintainable. Generating the boilerplate that used to eat an afternoon. Pair-debugging at 11pm when the bug is invisible and the only path forward is talking through what should be happening. The Claude subscription is the single most consequential line item in the operating budget, and it’s not close.

Self-hosted Postiz runs on the mini-PC. It handles social-media scheduling across LinkedIn, X, Threads, and Instagram. The reason it’s self-hosted rather than rented from a SaaS publisher is partly cost (publisher subscriptions add up across pillars) and partly control (the workflow needs to talk to Postiz programmatically and a hosted UI is the wrong shape for that). The container has been patched in two places to keep the publish queue reliable. The patches are in version control so they survive an image rebuild.

Self-hosted n8n runs on the same box. It’s the workflow brain. Cron jobs, webhook handlers, content pipelines, the stitching that connects the products to each other. n8n is the thing that lets a single person operate the surface area of a small studio, because the parts that should be automated get automated and the parts that need a human get scheduled.

Tailscale binds it together. Every device on the network can reach every other device by short name, regardless of which coffee-shop wifi or hotel router happens to be in the way today. The laptop opens the dashboard at http://postiz:4007 and Tailscale figures out where the mini-PC actually is. The setup works the same in Madrid, Amsterdam, and Santo Domingo.

That’s the software. Claude, Postiz, n8n, Tailscale. A few dashboards on top. No SaaS subscriptions beyond what the work strictly requires. The stack is small enough that I can hold all of it in my head, which means I can fix it when it breaks.

This is the stack that serves the bet: care plus velocity at the same time, possible because the surface area of the operation is deliberately small.

What I don’t have

The honest version of this post is the part about what’s missing.

I don’t have a professional network. I have friends, I have former colleagues, I have people who will return an email. I do not have an investor circle, a warm-intro pipeline, a board of advisors, or a Rolodex of CTOs who answer DMs. The kind of network that produces opportunities by existing has to be built from zero, and right now it doesn’t exist for the shop yet.

I don’t have an ad budget. Every customer that finds Aleluya finds it because someone said the name in a meeting. That works for warm referrals and falls apart for cold reach.

I don’t have a content team. The blog posts, the LinkedIn copy, the carousels, the captions, all of it comes through one head, drafted with Claude in the loop and edited by me. The volume is sustainable because Postiz handles the scheduling, but the writing is still writing.

The constraint is real. Most of the parts that a normal software business would buy or hire for, this one builds or skips.

The thing I’m learning slowly

Distribution is the open craft.

There’s a client of mine in the Dominican Republic who has automated his own distribution end-to-end. The output of his marketing funnel feeds back into the top, the work compounds week over week, and the mechanism runs whether or not he’s at his desk. Watching it from close range is an education. It also is not the same thing as having built it for myself.

The shop’s distribution is hand-built right now. Warm referrals into the front, careful work that produces more warm referrals coming out the back. It compounds, slowly, on the visible output. It is not a system I trust yet, in the sense that I can’t tell you what next month’s pipeline looks like with any confidence. I can tell you what shipped last month, and that’s most of what I have.

What’s still broken

Cross-border billing is the next problem on the list.

Three countries means three tax systems, three invoicing conventions, three sets of forms that have to be filed on different calendars in different languages. Currency conversion eats margin every time a Dominican client pays a euro invoice or a Dutch client pays a dollar one. None of this is unique to Aleluya. Every cross-border freelancer figures it out eventually. I am still in the figuring-out part, and the figuring-out is slow because there’s no one to delegate the paperwork to.

This is the cost of being one person with three flags. The stack handles the work. The paperwork is the part the stack does not handle.

Next Thursday: the work itself, two months in. The seven projects, the three countries, what each one taught me, and what’s still mid-build.