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Five tools, no sales pitch.

Here are five I actually pay for, with the part most lists leave out — when not to use them. No email wall, no PDF gate. If this is useful, the other 24 are one click away.

Last reviewed: 3 Sep 2026 · updated every quarter

The five

What they do for me,
and where they break.

Claude

Long drafts & reasoning Hit

Anything over 500 words starts here — structure, argument, first draft. The model I trust when I need to actually think, not just autocomplete.

Skip it for: quick factual lookups. That's like hiring an editor to spellcheck a text message.

Cursor

Daily coding Hit

Whole-repo context plus agent mode. This is the tool that made "one person, one laptop" real for me — I shipped a small paid product in two weeks with Cursor and Claude.

Skip it for: one-off scripts under 50 lines. Overkill, and you'll fight the agent more than you'd fight the code.

Midjourney

Hero visuals Hit

Brand visuals, mood boards, thumbnails. Two years in, nothing else matches the aesthetic when the image needs to carry the post.

Skip it for: anything with words in it. It still can't reliably spell — use Ideogram for that.

Make

Automation backbone Hit

The glue. When something happens, something else runs — publishing, file handling, handoffs between tools that don't talk to each other.

Skip it for: anything you'll only run twice. Automating a two-time task is just procrastination with a login.

Perplexity

First check, cited Hit

Every "is this actually true?" question starts here, because it shows sources. Fastest way I know to kill a bad idea before it becomes a post.

Skip it for: deep analysis. It skims by design — great compass, bad microscope.

29 tools tested · 7 categories 18 months of daily use My AI spend: —/mo Zero sponsored picks

Why listen

I break tools
so you don't have to.

This is my real setup

Not a roundup. Every tool here is one I pay for and open. If I dropped something, I say so.

Verdicts, not descriptions

"Hit", "keep", or "skip" — plus when not to reach for it. A list that only says what's good is marketing.

Refreshed quarterly

Tools die fast. The stack is reviewed every three months, and the new version is free if you already have it.

That's 5. There are 24 more.

The PDF adds the full 29 tools, the four copy-paste stacks (newsletter, solo SaaS, X growth, knowledge products), and the exact monthly cost of each. Pay what you want — €0 works.

Get the full stack → Browse all 29 free

No email wall · Instant PDF · Refreshed every quarter