How I Built a 9,700-Page Website With Claude Code and Zero Developers
I was tired of property flyers on my HDB gate. So I built CheckHowMuch.sg, a free site covering every HDB block in Singapore. Here's the full story.
It started with the flyers.
Every HDB owner in Singapore knows them. You come home, there’s a laminated card wedged into your gate. “Thinking of selling? Your block just transacted at $XXX,000!” Sometimes two in a week. Sometimes three. Nobody asked for them, but they keep coming.
One evening I pulled two off my gate and actually read them. The numbers looked interesting. But I had no way to verify them without visiting one of those property portals.
So I tried three different sites. Typed in my block. Hit search.
“Enter your phone number to see the results.”
Closed the tab. Next site.
“Leave your details and an agent will get back to you with a valuation.”
Next site. Same thing.
All three are repackaging data that sits on data.gov.sg for free. 227,000+ resale transactions. Anyone can download it. But they put it behind a contact form, because the moment you hand over your number, you become a “lead.” And that lead gets sold to an agent who now thinks you’re selling.
I wasn’t selling. I was just curious about my own flat.
That curiosity turned into a rabbit hole. I started digging into the raw government data and realised something no property site shows you clearly: lease decay.
Your HDB’s value isn’t just about what the last person paid. Every year that passes, your lease gets shorter. And the shorter it gets, the FASTER it decays. A block in Toa Payoh with 46 years left is losing 0.89% of its value per year just from the lease ticking down. A block in Tampines with 59 years left? Only 0.54%. That gap widens every year, not narrows.
No property site explains this. Because they’re not built for homeowners who want to understand. They’re built to capture leads.
So I built it myself
I spent a weekend with Claude Code and coffee. No business plan. No pitch deck. No team. Just a frustration I wanted to fix.
Two days later, I had CheckHowMuch.sg.
The site pulls 227,000+ HDB resale transactions from the government’s open data portal, generates a page for every block in Singapore, and deploys the whole thing as a static site on Cloudflare Pages. 9,700+ pages. Every town, every block, every flat type. Resale history, price trends, lease decay analysis, valuations.
All free. No login. No phone number. No contact wall. No flyers.
The tech stack is simple: Astro for static site generation, Claude Code for writing the data pipeline and page templates, and Cloudflare Pages for hosting. The entire thing costs $0 per month to run.
Everything that went wrong
The “shipped in 2 days” story sounds impressive until you hear about the 16 things that almost stopped it.
Within the first 48 hours:
A user told me some blocks were missing entire flat types. If a flat type had zero recent transactions, I wasn’t showing it at all. Invisible homes.
Another user said my valuation numbers felt too low. They were right. My formula was using town-wide averages instead of each block’s actual recent sales. A Tampines block was being compared against the entire Tampines average. I rewrote the valuation engine.
I enabled an analytics tool on Cloudflare and it silently replaced my website address. The live site was pointing at a completely different server. I only noticed because I happened to check.
Generating social preview images for all 9,700 blocks crashed my deploy pipeline 4 times. The image tool was eating up memory, hitting the limit at exactly 3,000 images every single time. Tried 3 different fixes before finding one that worked.
My government data source changed their download link without warning. The entire system returned “page not found.” Zero data until I figured out their new setup.
And the smaller stuff: a footer link to a page that didn’t exist yet, navigation pills that scrolled off-screen on mobile, postal code matching that took 3 rounds because the API only matched 6,700 of 9,700 blocks on the first try.
Every single one got fixed. Most within hours of discovery.
What the data actually shows
Once the site was stable, I started digging into what the data was telling me. Some of it was surprising.
Heartland HDB towns are growing FASTER than central areas. Not by a little. 35% vs 28% over five years. The towns most people dismissed as “too far” or “too ulu” (Singlish for remote, middle of nowhere) are quietly outperforming the expensive ones.
24 heartland blocks crossed $1 million for the FIRST time in Q1 2026 alone. Woodlands leads with 8 blocks. Woodlands. The town people joke about being closer to JB than to the CBD.
Block 605 in Ang Mo Kio has appreciated 335.5% in 5 years. One unit sold for $1.35 million. Not a condo. An HDB flat.
Block 7 in Telok Blangah has a median price of $205,000. Right next to HarbourFront and Sentosa. One of the best locations in Singapore and the most affordable block on the leaderboard.
Even Yishun has a millionaire flat now. Block 650, Yishun Avenue 4. $1.1 million.
What I actually learned
Building the website from scratch was the easy part.
Maintaining it, refreshing the data, adding new insights with consistent design and accurate numbers. That is where the real work is. And where I learned how to guide Claude Code to make better, more consistent decisions over time.
Everyone can build a website in a weekend with AI. The hard part is week two, when you need to refresh the data, fix edge cases, and ship new features without breaking what already works.
That is actually what I teach in my Claude Code workshop. Not just “how to prompt” but how to build something real, maintain it, and keep shipping. The difference between a demo and a product is the 16 bugs you fix after launch.
CheckHowMuch.sg is not a startup. It’s a thing I built because I wanted it to exist. And it turns out, when you build something useful and make it free, people share it. No marketing budget required.
If you own an HDB flat, go check your block.