Free election dashboard stack: laptop scraper + `Cloudflare KV` survived a one-day traffic spike

The useful part is the architecture, not the Claude flex: scrape on a laptop, push static snapshots to Cloudflare KV, let the CDN absorb reads. It handled a real spike on free tier limits, so this pattern is worth copying for short-lived live dashboards.

• —Data flow stayed minimal: a Python scraper pulled 234 raw HTML result pages, merged them, and published snapshots every 30 seconds with no DB or paid hosting.
• —Traffic was non-trivial: 24K visitors, 430K requests, and 8.7 GB bandwidth from 24 countries, which validates the static-distribution approach under bursty demand.
• —The sharp edge was write quota, not reads: 997 writes in a day against a 1,000 free-tier cap. This works, but only if update frequency is tightly controlled.
• —Feature iteration stayed fast during the event: 60+ commits in one day and new requests shipped within minutes. AI helped with output speed; product judgment still sat with the builder.