Brittny Ann Photography website case study

The project

Brittny Ann Photography is a client project, a website for a new, part-time business in the Logan, Utah area. The brief was two jobs on one site: a public, photo-forward front for the work, and a private place where clients view and download their finished galleries. It also had to cost almost nothing to run while the business is small. That cost constraint drove the whole architecture.

The Build

This is a Next.js 15 site running on Cloudflare, engineered around a single idea: keep the cost near zero by designing around $0 egress.

Key technical decisions:

• Private R2 bucket, no public URL. Original photos live in Cloudflare R2, which charges no egress fees. The bucket is never exposed directly; a single worker is the only public read path for images.
• On-the-fly resizing with Cloudflare Images. The worker resizes originals to web sizes on demand and edge-caches them, so full-resolution files never leave storage during normal browsing.
• Folder-as-gallery. Brittny drops photos into a folder in the bucket and a gallery appears. A scheduled worker reconciles the bucket with the database, creating galleries and, for private ones, an unguessable share code.
• Watermarked public galleries, private client delivery. Public galleries are watermarked and view-only. Private galleries are reached by share code and allow full-resolution downloads through short-lived presigned links.
• Portable by design. Storage and database are reached over Cloudflare’s HTTP APIs rather than runtime bindings, so the same code runs on any Node host.

Results

The client got a professional, fast site that delivers galleries to clients, running on infrastructure that costs almost nothing while the business is small and can scale up without re-architecting. The interesting part of this project was the build, not the storefront.

Build log: building a near-zero-cost photography site, and the bug that took it down.