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From the Dracon workshop

We maintain structured catalogs of AI providers, games, music, and tools — these articles are written from that data, not from vibes. When the data changes, the articles get regenerated.

  1. Infrastructure We read the SLA fine print of 12 VPS providers so you don't have to Marketing pages say 99.9%. Contracts say things like 95% — or nothing at all. Every published uptime commitment across our 12-provider VPS catalog, read from the actual legal documents.
  2. Infrastructure The renewal trap, ranked: year-1 → year-2 jumps at 12 domain registrars The first year is marketing; the second year is the price. We ranked all 12 registrars in our captured catalog by their .com renewal jump — from IONOS's +1900% to Cloudflare's 0%.
  3. Infrastructure What the exchange rate does to your domain bill: EUR registrars in USD clothing A €10.07 renewal is not a $10.07 renewal. How ignoring the euro/dollar rate misranks European registrars by ~7% — and what fixed ranking looks like.
  4. Infrastructure The hidden ICANN fee: who includes the $0.18 and who tacks it on Every gTLD registration carries a mandatory $0.18/year ICANN fee. Whether it's already inside the listed price depends entirely on the registrar — and checkout is where you find out.
  5. Infrastructure Free first year = infinite markup: promo domains, dissected A $0 or $1 first year renders as a 0% 'renewal hike' on most comparison sites — the worst promos look like the best deals anywhere on the internet. Here is the math that fixes it.
  6. Infrastructure When $1.38 cheaper is worse: scoring features into price comparisons Two cloud storage plans, $1.38 apart on a $556 bill. Which wins? Our answer — price decides, near-ties badge — and why naive 'always cheapest' and old feature-band ranking lie in different ways.
  7. Infrastructure Vector DB free tiers, compared without the marketing gloss "Free forever" means 21 different things across the vector database market. Every free tier in our captured catalog — storage, vectors, queries, credits — on one honest table.
  8. Infrastructure Your first 10k emails: what transactional email really costs at launch Six vendors charge $0/month at launch volume — and the paid floor starts at $15. Every price below comes from our captured email-API catalog, run through the same compute engine our comparison tool uses.
  9. AI providers The cheapest way to run Claude right now: every route in our catalog, from $0 to $200 a month Seven providers we track serve Claude. Free lanes, pay-as-you-go, and subscriptions compared, with the catches and the cheapest route for light vs heavy use.
  10. AI providers AI promo codes that actually work (August 2026): all 15 we track, what they get you, and the catches Our catalog tracks 15 active AI promo and referral codes across 13 providers. What each one gets you, the fine-print limits, and which are worth the effort.
  11. AI providers Free AI API rate limits, compared: which free tiers can do real work and which are demo taps 22 of the 45 AI providers we track have a free tier. The real limits side by side: RPM, daily caps, token grants, and the 7 that hold up for actual work.
  12. Products What bring-your-own-key actually costs: the real math The honest math behind bring-your-own-key: real API token prices from our 45-provider catalog versus $20 AI subscriptions, and why Dracon Omni is $10.
  13. Products One person, one platform: how dracon.uk actually runs An honest ops tour of dracon.uk: one VPS, five static apps and two Node apps behind Caddy, five Rust APIs on unix sockets, Paddle, OVH buckets, one person.
  14. Products We published 5 novels written by our own book pipeline Five novels, 523,980 words, written end to end by our own book pipeline and published free forever with the AI label on the tin. Meet the Dracon Bookstore.
  15. Games How a game ships to the Dracon arcade: build, bucket, catalog flip The 8-step pipeline from local build to OVH bucket to the catalog flip, the real status counts across our 18-game catalog today, and what ships next.
  16. Games Three games, one bug: the SvelteKit hosting bug that broke our arcade One SvelteKit default broke three of our games on the same night: 390 to 451 reloads in six seconds, zero console errors. The full postmortem, with the fix.
  17. Music What 2,500 tracks of focus music have in common: we ran the numbers We computed the real stats behind our 2,500-track focus library: BPM bands, mood-tag counts, the 10-track rule, and why only 3 cooks in 250 carry the focus tag.
  18. Music Music to fall asleep to, built from recipes Seven sleep-friendly cooks from our 2,500-track recipe library: a 40 BPM space drift, a note held for hours, dark ambient with a shadow, and honest caveats.
  19. AI providers The AI price war went nuclear this week: DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.14/M tokens and GPT-5.6 Luna down 80% — in the same 24 hours OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna 80% on July 30; DeepSeek shipped V4 Flash to public beta July 31 from $0.14/M tokens. We track 45 AI providers — here's what changed, with numbers.
  20. AI providers 22 of the 45 AI providers we track have a free tier. Only 7 are actually useful. We maintain rate-limit data on 45 AI providers. Most 'free tiers' are demo taps. These 7 hold up for real work — with actual limits and how to mix them via BYOK.
  21. Games 18 games in the pipeline, 1 playable today: an honest state of the Dracon arcade Our games catalog tracks 18 projects from released to experimental. What each status means, what's playable now, and why we publish the pipeline honestly.
  22. Music 2,500 tracks, 250 mixes, 166 mood tags: we built a free focus-music library and kept the receipts The Dracon music library is 2,500 generated tracks in 250 curated 'cooks', every recipe kept. The data behind it and how to use it.
  23. Products Where do your AI keys go when you use our tools? A straight answer BYOK tools ask for the most sensitive string you own. Exactly what happens to your keys across Dracon tools — extension, chat, vault — and what we never do.