What does a one-person web shop do with the hours nobody is working? Mine puts them to use. I run Claude autonomous tasks overnight, two a night, against my own to-do list.

I started because of simple math. I pay $100 a month for my Claude plan (Anthropic lists its Max plan as starting at $100 a month). Usage is metered in rolling five-hour windows, and I burn through plenty of it during the workday. The hours outside my workday were going unused, and work run then costs me nothing extra. I've hit my weekly limit about once, I think, so the night runs haven't pushed me over.

Two Cards a Night, Worked While I Sleep

I keep my work in Todoist, a task app. A helper reads my backlog and picks the tasks that can run on their own. It lines up two a night, Monday through Friday, in a section called Autonomous, each with a date.

At 12:30 AM a scheduled job opens them and Claude works them. Nobody's awake to answer questions, so Claude makes its own assumptions and writes them down. Every run aims to finish the task. It isn't allowed to hand me a checklist and call that done.

What It Means for Your Site

My own projects stop competing with your work for daylight. A lot of what runs overnight is my own Sitez site and my PostHelp products. That work used to wait behind everything else. Now it gets done at night, so it doesn't take hours from my day.

A person reads everything before it counts. Each task sends me an email. A green check means it finished and a blocked sign means it didn't. The body is a plain account of what Claude did, step by step. A shorter version lands as a comment on the card. In the morning I open each one in the matching Claude project and ask it to compare my task with its own email and tell me if anything's still open. Finished ones get checked off. Nothing is closed because a machine said so.

Blocked means stopped, not guessed. When Claude can't get in, or a call is mine to make, it says so and stops. Blocked cards I finish together with Claude the next morning.

The same habit of writing things down runs the rest of my shop, which I describe in Claude for Freelancers: How I Structured It to Run a One-Person WordPress Shop. One night went sideways in an interesting way, and that story is in Autonomous AI Guardrails. This post is the everyday routine.

Where It Falls Short

Not every card finishes. By my count of the run log, there have been 67 logged runs since the first scheduled one on July 16, 2026. Fourteen did no work that counted, mostly because nothing eligible was queued. The other 53 worked 131 cards. 69 finished and 62 blocked. I tallied those from the log entries by hand, so treat them as close, not audited.

A task has to be written clearly enough that Claude understands it cold when it opens the card. Simple, single-step tasks usually finish. Cards with several subtasks do well lately, but they usually don't finish all the way.

The setup matters too. My computer has to be on. The site a task needs has to be open and logged in in my Chrome, so Claude can work as me. Missing access is the most common reason a run comes back blocked.

The Invitation

I can't tell you this makes your site better by itself. It makes my own backlog move while I sleep, and I read the results before anything is closed. It also changed how I think about my time, which is why I wrote about hourly billing and AI.

If you're wondering how AI could help your business, take a look at my AI for Business page or just write to me. If you're technical and want the details of the setup, ask. I'll walk you through it.

Questions I Expect About This

Does Claude work on my site overnight?

Sometimes. I choose which cards go in the queue, and I read every result the next morning. Nothing is closed until I've checked it.

Can I do this myself?

Probably. Start with one small, single-step task written so someone could do it cold. Make sure the site it needs is open and logged in on a computer that's on.

What does it cost?

I pay $100 a month for my Claude plan, and the night runs use hours I wasn't using anyway. That's what I pay and see, not Anthropic's terms, so check the current plans at claude.com/pricing.