You're already most of the way there — you just don't know it yet, and the parts that hurt aren't the ones you'd guess. Here's the full picture.
I had a long conversation with Claude about your situation — what you're building, what's running, what's broken, what you've got on hand. I want to lay out where I think you should land and how to get there. None of this requires you to buy hardware. The pieces you already own are the right pieces.
Your Mac mini becomes the brain. Every other device — MacBook Pro, Air, phone, iPad — becomes a window into it. You write code from any device, and the actual stuff runs in one place that's always on. Then you graduate individual products to small cloud servers when they start having paying users. That's it. Three layers, clear graduation rules.
Since you have Claude Max, the fastest way to set all of this up is to let Claude Code do almost all of it for you. Here's how:
⌘ + Spacebar, type "Terminal", hit Enter. A black-and-white window will open. That's where you'll paste a few commands./bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" && eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)" && brew install anthropic-ai/tap/claude-code
claude and press Enter. It'll ask you to sign in with your Claude account — click the link it gives you, sign in with the email tied to your Max plan, paste the code back into Terminal. You're now talking to Claude.Please read julianna-plan.austinrenfroe.com and follow the setup instructions linked at the bottom (claude-setup.html). I'm a non-technical user — please bother me as little as possible, batch your questions, and run your own tests instead of asking me to verify.
If anything goes sideways: tell Claude what you saw on screen in plain language ("the install command printed an error") — it'll diagnose and fix. If a Claude session ends mid-setup and you start a fresh one, just point it back at this URL — the instructions are designed for it to inspect what's already done and pick up from there.
— Austin
| Hardware | Job |
|---|---|
| Mac mini (new, Apple Silicon) |
Your always-on brain. Runs your projects, your background jobs, and Claude Code itself. Plug it in somewhere out of the way, set it to never sleep, leave it running 24/7. |
| MacBook Pro | Your main screen + keyboard, but it stops doing the heavy lifting. It just connects to the Mac mini. Close the lid, move to another room — your work keeps running. |
| MacBook Air | Same as the Pro, just smaller. Use whichever's handy. |
| Phone / iPad | Also clients. Check on a job, kick off a Claude chat, or see "is anything broken" from your phone. |
| Thing | What it does for you |
|---|---|
| TailscaleFree | Lets you reach the Mac mini from anywhere — coffee shop, traveling, phone on cell — like you're sitting in front of it. 5-min install. |
| CloudflareFree + ~$10/yr for a domain | Makes your projects reachable on the public internet when you're ready to share something. No router fiddling. |
| Healthchecks.ioFree | Tiny external service whose only job is to text or email you the moment a background job fails. The smoke detector for your cron stack. This is the answer to "95% are broken at any given time" — you'll know. |
| 1Password CLIFree (you already pay for 1Password) | Lets your code pull a password out of 1Password at runtime so secrets aren't sitting inside the code anymore. Closes the "passwords in memory" gap you mentioned. |
| GitHubFree | Where your code lives, separate from the Mac mini. Every git push is also a backup. |
| Backblaze~$9/mo | Backs up the entire Mac mini to the cloud automatically. Set it up once, forget about it. |
| DockerFree | Each project runs in its own sealed container. When one breaks, the others don't notice. Standard tooling. |
Total ongoing cost: under $20/month until you have a product or two earning revenue. Then each public product adds about $5/mo for a small cloud server.
This isn't a one-weekend project — you'll do it over a few sessions. The order matters because each step makes the next easier.
Plug it in somewhere permanent. Set it to never sleep. Install: Docker, Tailscale, the 1Password CLI, the GitHub CLI, and Claude Code itself.
Sign up for Healthchecks.io. For each of your 24 cron jobs, add a one-line "ping when I succeed" call. Don't fix the broken ones yet — just install the smoke detector. Now you can see what's actually broken vs. fine.
With visibility in place, fix what matters, retire what doesn't. Get to over 80% green. Great task to hand to Claude Code, by the way.
Every secret out of code and memory, into 1Password, pulled at runtime by the CLI. Closes the security gap.
One repo per project. Push from the Mac mini. Now your code has a copy that survives the Mac mini.
Install the app, let it back up the Mac mini in the background. Done.
You don't need it until then. When you do, set up a "Cloudflare Tunnel" — your Mac mini reaches out to Cloudflare, Cloudflare hands users in. Works behind any apartment ISP, no router config.
Hetzner gives you a small Linux server for ~$5/month. Each productized thing gets its own. The Mac mini stays as the place you build and test; the cloud server is where customers actually hit it.
Gitea is what I use because I like self-hosting and I run my own. For you, GitHub is the right call: free for everything you need, industry standard, and it includes free automation tools (GitHub Actions) you'll want when you start deploying to cloud servers. Self-hosting code on the Mac mini would just be another thing to babysit, with no real upside at your scale.
Recommended layers, simplest first:
git push is a backup. Free, automatic.Three-layer story: code in three places, machine state in two, you can rebuild from scratch if needed. About $9/month total.
That's the whole picture. Each piece is small and well-understood individually — the hardest part is just doing the steps in order, most of which Claude Code can walk you through directly. When you're ready to start, follow the "How to actually do this" panel near the top of this page.
— Austin
You are reading this because Julianna pasted this URL into a Claude Code session. The plan above is for her — your detailed operating brief is a separate document. Read it now before taking any action.
Setup instructions for you → julianna-plan.austinrenfroe.com/claude-setup.html
That document covers operating principles (autonomy-first, batch credential collection, write your own tests), all 13 setup phases (Tailscale, GitHub, Healthchecks, 1Password CLI, Docker, Backblaze, Cloudflare Tunnel), and a self-running end-to-end verification script. It is written for you specifically.