Front Row

Why Build It at All?

Because I can 😉

My use case is simple. A free live session. Fifty seats, a waiting list, a few emails before and a few after. Every events platform out there can do that and a lot more. I need less than 10% of what any of them offer.

So I built the 10%, exactly the way I want it. I manage all my online events, emails, follow-ups and forms by myself, on a single Cloudflare Worker.

What It Does

• A page for every session: you leave your email, and that is it. The time is shown in your own time zone, so nobody has to do the maths.
• A waiting list that runs itself: if someone drops out, the next person in line is offered their seat and gets two days to take it. If they do not, it goes to the person after them.
• A calendar invite that keeps up: your seat comes with an invite. If the date changes, or the joining link arrives later, the event already in your calendar updates on its own.
• Reminders, so nobody forgets: one the day before, one an hour before, and a short feedback form once the session is over.
• Sign-up and feedback forms: a waiting list for the next session, and a quick “how was it?” after every one.
• Emails that sound like me: I write them once and send them to whoever needs them, without copying addresses around.
• One place for everything: who signed up, who is waiting, who came last time, and every email each of them got.

What It Runs On

Cloudflare Workers runs all of it: the public pages, the back office and the scheduled jobs. D1 is the database. A Cron Trigger every five minutes sends the reminders and works through the email queue. Cloudflare Access guards the back office, so there is no password anywhere in the code, and Turnstile keeps bots off the forms.

Hono is the web framework. Resend delivers the emails. GitHub Actions tests and deploys every push. And I built the whole thing with Claude Code.

What It Costs

$5 a month to Cloudflare. $0 for sending emails.

And that $5 is not just for Front Row. It is one Workers Paid plan, shared by all my personal apps, the apps I have built for my wife, and my own experiments.

The plan includes 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds a month. D1 adds 25 billion rows read and 50 million rows written. Past that, it is pay per use, and the rates are tiny: $0.30 per extra million requests. If I ever go over, I would not even notice.

Email is Resend’s free plan: 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day. So Front Row never fires off an email the moment it is written. Every message waits in a queue and goes out within the daily limit. A big send simply finishes tomorrow instead of hitting the cap, and a seat confirmation always goes first.