Every tool on this page is one I personally pay for or use in production every week. No sponsorships, no ghost mentions, no filler. If it is listed here, it has earned its place in my actual workflow.
Where the actual code gets written.
Using since November 2025
Google AI Studio's Build feature is my go-to for quickly prototyping apps, websites, and UI ideas. When I have a rough concept for a landing page, a small web tool, or a layout I want to try, I describe it in a prompt and see a working version rendered back inside a minute. The free tier gives plenty of room to iterate, and the speed advantage keeps bringing me back whenever a new idea needs a fast visual sanity check.
Daily thinking, research, and writing.
Using since October 2025
Google's AI Search mode has become my preferred tool for quick research queries, particularly when I am away from my desk and only have my phone. The integration with Search delivers citation-backed answers faster than any other assistant I have tested, which matters more than I expected. For deeper research I still reach for Perplexity, but for fast on-the-go answers, Gemini is the clear winner on both speed and quality.
Using since September 2025
Grok has become my default for anything that requires current X data, and the live search integration is genuinely useful for trend spotting, tracking what is going viral, and understanding what founders are complaining about in real time. It is far more reliable than scraping X directly, and the reasoning quality is strong for the price. For longer-form work I still prefer Claude, but Grok wins on anything time-sensitive.
The backend that powers everything else.
Using since April 2026
Firecrawl has become my primary scraping tool, and I recently upgraded to a higher-tier monthly plan that gives us enough headroom to stop watching the usage meter during research-heavy weeks. The batch API is the feature that matters most when I need to pull structured data from a long list of URLs in one pass. It is not the cheapest option at scale, but the combination of JavaScript rendering and clean markdown output has been worth every pound.
Using since February 2026
Convex powers the backend for myaiguide.co, and the combination of scheduled functions, realtime queries, and strictly typed mutations lets me ship features faster than any other backend stack I have used. The free tier is genuinely generous, so costs stay predictable as you grow. The only meaningful constraint worth planning around is the 10-minute cap on actions, which you will want to route longer jobs off of.
Using since February 2026
Vercel is where every frontend I build eventually lives, thanks to its per-PR preview deploys, clean redirect syntax in next.config, and ISR with revalidateTag support. The git-push auto-deploy has been unreliable this year, so I now always follow every push with an explicit `vercel deploy --prod --yes`. Everything else about the platform works as advertised, which is unusually rare in modern developer tooling.
Using since December 2025
Tavily was my go-to research API before Firecrawl upgraded its offering. The search and extract endpoints are clean and dependable, and the API surface is easy to reason about. I am currently migrating our pipelines to Firecrawl after expanding our plan there, but Tavily's free tier remains a valuable backup for any future scenario where we need to split research calls across multiple providers.
Using since April 2026
DataForSEO is my primary source for keyword and SERP data, and the combination of coverage, reliability, and reasonable pricing has kept me using it over every mainstream alternative I have tried. The raw API gives me exactly the fields I need without the bloated UI layer that most SEO platforms insist on, and the Task POST mode keeps costs sensible when I am running larger batches. For serious research work, it is the only source I fully trust.
Where every task, alert, and review lives.
Using since September 2024
ClickUp is the operational hub for every project I run, covering tasks, review queues, and daily planning in a single workspace. The REST API is reliable enough that I wire notifications to it directly from almost every internal system without needing any middleware in between.
Measuring what is working and distributing what does.
Using since April 2026
PostHog provides our product analytics layer, and the HogQL query language has been genuinely useful because I can slice user behaviour directly without first building a dashboard. The EU-hosted instance satisfies our GDPR requirements, and the session replay feature has already caught a bug that no Lighthouse audit would have flagged. Pricing stays affordable until you hit serious scale on session recordings.
Using since February 2026
Beehiiv is the platform I use to host the myaiguide.co newsletter, and the dashboard has quietly become one of my favourite pieces of software to open. The API accepts drafts programmatically, which is the feature I lean on most, and the editorial workflow around scheduling and A/B testing subject lines is genuinely well thought through. For anyone serious about owning their newsletter and not renting it from Substack, it is the choice I keep coming back to.
Everything else that earns its keep.
Using since October 2025
Fal.ai is my default platform for generative media, particularly image and short video work, because per-second GPU billing keeps experimentation cheap in a way that per-run pricing simply does not. The Flux Kontext Pro pricing at around four cents per image is the best rate I have found at comparable quality. The cold-start times on hosted models have also been consistently low enough that I can wire them straight into production pipelines.
I have been using Recraft V4.1 for the brand work on myaiguide.co -- logos, social cards, the occasional SVG icon. The model is genuinely amazing on typography and vector output: V4.1 Vector emits real editable SVGs that open clean in Illustrator and Figma without any tracing step. Once you stop fighting other models to render readable text, Recraft handles the entire brand system from one studio.
13 tools across 6 categories. Affiliate links on this page are disclosed; see our disclosure.
See the full editorial methodology on our methodology page, and the full commercial model on our disclosure page.
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