Stelae runs on a single machine

The Stelae homepage is a carved slab and a price. "Keep WordPress." Then, in gold italics, "Delete WordPress hosting." €19.90 a year per site. Free during public beta. No card. Under the price, in small type: "Single-operator. Sign-ups limited at first to keep things smooth." Read only the headline and you bought a cheap host.

Scroll to The Process. That column is the ship.

WordPress is the editor. Static HTML is the product.

— stelae.eu

Build is a private WordPress in an isolated cloud container. Any theme. Any plugin. Nothing to install on your laptop. Deploy is one click to statichost.eu, Cloudflare Workers, or a git host. Sleep is the third card. Their line, not ours:

Your editor sleeps when you're not using it. Visitors see fast static files served from your host.

— stelae.eu

Visitors never get the editor URL. The live site has no PHP, no database, no login page. The FAQ on uptime is drier than the gold italics. There is no formal SLA, because the live site does not depend on Stelae once it is deployed.

Türkheim, one person, one machine

Leon Becker is the service provider on the Impressum. Türkheim, Bavaria. A single-operator shop. EuroMakers files the listing under Developer Tools because you still bring a host for the files. The company is a man and a machine.

The FAQ in the docs names the hardware.

Stelae runs on a single machine, operated by one person, so sign-ups are limited at launch to keep operations smooth while the system proves itself in production.

— docs.stelae.eu/faq

Containers idle most of the time. The cap can rise. What stays fixed, they write, is "one person can comfortably run this". That constraint, not a seat count, is what makes €19.90 a year sustainable without VC, autoscaling, or a support team.

That is the claim a directory card cannot give you. The listing will tell you the editor sleeps. It will not tell you the price is a headcount.

He runs his own blog on it. The footer points at blog.leonbecker.de. Kadence theme. Ordinary pages. He wrote that the usual WordPress launch checklists for Site Security Setup and Website Performance Setup do not matter in the same way, because the public site is files. He also named the people who should stay away: shops, memberships, native comments, dashboards, anything that needs WordPress to react to each visitor.

The beta will not be grandfathered

Open the first FAQ on the homepage today and the calendar is the story.

The free public beta runs at least until 31 October 2026 (extended from the original 27 July). When it ends, sites convert to the paid plan (€19.90/year). Free sites won't be grandfathered. At this price, the economics don't allow it.

— stelae.eu

Thirty days' notice. Download the archive and the WordPress backup. Cancel. You owe nothing. The static site you already deployed keeps running on its host. If he shuts the shop, the terms promise at least ninety days to take your files. Once the HTML has left his machine, the public site does not need him.

Static means static

WooCommerce will build a catalogue page. The cart will not check out. Contact Form 7 has nowhere to POST. WordPress search has no database. Comments have no table. A newsroom that publishes dozens of posts a day would spend the day exporting.

The compatibility guide's rule of thumb is the whole product: if the feature generates HTML when you save, it survives. If it runs PHP when a visitor loads the page, it does not.

Who should not buy it

Use something else if you need WordPress to be the public site. Stelae will still give you a Panel. Visitors will never see it.

• You want a cart, a checkout, and WooCommerce accounts. Product pages export. The shop does not.
• You need memberships, logins, or gated content. Exported HTML is public.
• You want native comments, a forum, or a dashboard that updates per request.
• You publish dozens of posts a day. The export step would be the job.
• You expected the beta to stay free. It will not. Thirty days' notice, then €19.90, or take your files.
• You need a sales engineer and a support team. The Impressum is one name.

If you want WordPress as an editor, HTML as the public site, and a bill that a one-person host in Türkheim can actually keep — start with the listing, then read the FAQ. The homepage will show you a price. The FAQ will show you a machine.

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