Home/AI Stack

The AI tools I actually pay for.

Eight tools, three subscriptions, and the reason I dropped the other dozen I tried this year.

Writing & research

For everything that needs words.

★ Daily driver

Claude

My primary writing partner. Best at long-form reasoning, tone matching, and refusing to invent things it doesn’t know.

Tier: Pro$20/mo

Daily

ChatGPT

Faster than Claude on short tasks. Quick drafts, social posts, speed-over-depth work.

Tier: Plus$20/mo

Weekly

Readwise

Highlight from anywhere, surface highlights forever. Turned my reading from passive to compounding.

Tier: Reader$8/mo

Audio & video

Spoken & visual work.

Weekly

Descript

Edit audio like a doc. Remove filler words with a click. Made podcasting feasible solo.

Tier: Creator$24/mo

Weekly

Fathom

Free, accurate AI meeting notes. Replaced Otter for me this year. Tighter summaries.

Tier: FreeFree

Sometimes

Canva AI

Fastest path from a brief to acceptable visuals. Not for hero design — for everything else.

Tier: Pro$15/mo

Automation & ops

The plumbing.

Daily

Make.com

For automations with branching logic. Cheaper than Zapier per task with real visibility.

Tier: Core$10/mo

Sometimes

Zapier

When the integration only lives in Zapier’s catalog. Otherwise Make wins on price.

Tier: Starter$19/mo

Daily

Notion AI

Inside-the-doc AI for planning, summarising, rewriting. Where I think — not where I publish.

Tier: Plus + AI$18/mo

Total monthly cost: $134

The full stack — replacing what was previously $300+/mo of overlapping subscriptions.

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