I run a surf forecast for 20 breaks in Morocco on EUR 0/month. Here's the stack.

I live on the Taghazout coast in Morocco - a strip of Atlantic between Agadir and Imsouane that's basically one long right-hand point break after another. Two years ago the only way to know if tomorrow was worth it was to check three different global forecast sites, none of which knew the difference between Anchor Point and the beach break 400m south of it. So I built taghazout.io . It now covers 20 named breaks, runs in 10 languages, and costs me nothing per month. Here's how it's actually put together - including the parts I'd do differently. The stack is deliberately boring Hand-rolled PHP. No framework, no build step, no node_modules. About 4,800 files, server-rendered, no hydration. That sounds like a confession, but it was the right call for one reason: my readers are on phones, on cafe Wi-Fi, often on 3G. A server-rendered page that ships HTML and a little CSS beats anything I could have built with a client-side framework in that environment. Time-to-content is the only metric that matters when someone is standing on the beach deciding whether to paddle out. The hosting is a cheap shared plan. The forecast data is free and open. The whole thing runs at EUR 0/month recurring , which was a hard constraint from day one. The interesting part: two ocean models that disagree The forecast blends two sources: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0) - the primary, with a marine endpoint that covers our coastal cells. NOAA WaveWatch III via PacIOOS - the second opinion. Here's the thing nobody tells you: they disagree, a lot. On the same hour at the same break I've seen WaveWatch read ~55% higher than Open-Meteo (1.36m vs 0.88m). Offshore models resolve coastal bathymetry badly, and our points are exactly the kind of close-in, shallow-reef setups where that bias shows up. The wrong fix is to pick one and pretend. What I did instead: Run both, cache both. Compute agreement over a 72-hour window - a Pearson correlation on the swell rhythm plus a circular difference on direction (you can'