From October 2025 through May 2026 our git history looked quiet while Gmail looked loud. That is not idle time — it is the pilot tax:
- GoDaddy storage violations and Launch hosting upgrades
- WordPress Premium Support pilots on an aging plugin stack
- Donor beta QA — Alec: "Lee is in charge" (Oct 2025)
- Supabase security remediation (Feb 2026)
- Sign-in flows tested across axanar.com, axanardonors.com, and Fly staging
Fans experienced three logins and three different UX shells. Operators reconciled exports, fixed webhooks, and answered support mail while volunteer hours stacked (~296h reconciled on the Fly replacement alone).
Monthly recurring spend peaked around $250–370 across GoDaddy, Lovable, Supabase, and partial Fly hosting. The unified target is roughly $120–185/mo after sundown — but only if we finish the merge and stop paying for overlap.
This post is the honest middle of the story: unification is not a flip-switch; it is paying down parallel systems until one domain wins.