Tools I use

Claude + Claude Code

Anthropic's models and a terminal agent that writes and runs code

Free tier, Pro $20/mo, Max from $100/mo, API billed per token

Cursor

VS Code fork with the AI model wired into the editor

Hobby free, individual plans from $20 per month, Teams $40 per user per month

fal.ai

Hosted image and video models behind one API, pay per use

Pay per use, for example Nano Banana 2 at $0.08 per image, video billed per second

Gemini API

Google's models by API: text, vision and image generation

Free tier with limits, then per token; image generation from $0.067 per image

LM Studio

Desktop app to download and run open-weight models on your own machine

Free for personal and work use

OpenAI Codex CLI

OpenAI's coding agent for the terminal, a second pair of hands

Included in ChatGPT Plus from $20/mo, Pro from $100/mo, extra credits on top

Perplexity

Answer engine with sources, plus the Comet browser

Free tier, Pro $20 per month, Max $200 per month; Comet browser free

Tailscale

A private network between your machines, no port forwarding required

Personal free for up to 6 users, Standard $8 per user per month

1Password

Password manager with service accounts and a CLI for secrets

Individual from $3.99/mo, Families $5.99/mo, Teams Starter $24.95/mo for 10, Business $8.99 per user

Cloudflare

DNS, CDN, Workers and tunnels in front of everything you host

Free plan, Pro $20/mo per domain, Business $200/mo, Workers paid from $5/mo

Playwright

Browser automation library for tests, screenshots and scripted capture

Free, open source under the Apache 2.0 licence

Contabo

Cheap German VPS and dedicated servers, billed in euros

Cloud VPS from 4.40 EUR per month on a 24-month term

Netlify

Static hosting with git-push deploys and built-in form handling

Free plan, Personal $9/mo, Pro $20/mo for unlimited members

Vercel

Hosting for Next.js sites with a preview deployment per branch

Hobby free, Pro $20 per user per month plus usage, Enterprise custom

AWS (EC2, S3, SES)

Compute, object storage and transactional mail, billed by the hour

Pay as you go; new accounts get up to $200 in credits for six months

Namecheap

Domain registrar with an API for registration, renewals and DNS

Pay per domain, see pricing page; .com renewals cost more than the first year

Supabase

Hosted Postgres with auth, storage and an instant REST API

Free plan, Pro from $25/mo plus compute, Team from $599/mo

ClickHouse

Column store that answers analytics queries over billions of rows in seconds

Open source and free to self-host; Cloud is usage-based with $300 trial credits

Airtable

Spreadsheet and database in one, with forms, views and a clean API

Free plan, Team $20 per seat per month billed annually, Business $45

Remotion

Make videos programmatically with React components and plain TypeScript

Free for individuals and companies up to 3 people; company licence $25 per seat per month or $0.01 per render with a $100/mo minimum

ComfyUI

Node-based interface for running image models on your own machine

Free, open source; Comfy Cloud from $20/mo

ElevenLabs

Text to speech and voice cloning that sounds human, with an API

Free tier, Starter $6/mo, Creator $22/mo, Pro $99/mo, Scale $299/mo

Adobe Creative Cloud

Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Illustrator on one subscription

see pricing page

Canva

Browser design tool for quick layouts, decks and brand kits

Free plan; Pro and Business are paid, see pricing page

Captions

AI video app for captions, dubbing and talking avatars

Max $24.99 per month, Frontier from $69.99 per month (app prices shown)

Higgsfield

AI image and video studio with an API and an MCP server

Credit-based subscription tiers, see pricing page

Superscale

AI ad-creative generator that turns a product page into statics and videos

Free credits to start; plans from $99/mo (8,000 credits)

Vmake AI

Watermark removal and upscaling for images and video, with an API

Free tier with daily credits, Plus and Pro plans, API billed by usage; see pricing page

ScrapeCreators

API that returns ad-library and social-media data as JSON

100 free credits; pay as you go from $47 for 25,000 credits

Foreplay

Ad swipe file and library with boards and briefs

From $49/mo billed yearly ($59 monthly), 7-day trial

AdPlexity

Ad intelligence across native, push, mobile and e-commerce

Per product, from $99/mo (Social) to $249/mo (Native); cheaper on yearly billing

Stripe

Payments, subscriptions and invoicing, all driven through one API

No monthly fee; per transaction, e.g. 1.5% + 0.25 EUR for standard EU cards

ClickFlare

Ad tracker with click and conversion attribution across traffic sources

From $69/mo billed yearly ($89 monthly), 14-day trial

Google Workspace

Mail, calendar, drive and docs on your own domain

From 6.80 EUR per user per month (Starter), Standard 13.60 EUR; cheaper on an annual plan

Invoice Ninja

Open-source invoicing with recurring invoices and a client portal

Free up to 5 clients; Pro $14/mo or $140/yr; self-hosted free (white label $40/yr)

Jotform

Online form builder with payments, PDFs and an API

Free (5 forms, 100 submissions/mo); Bronze from $34/mo billed yearly ($39 monthly)

Everflow

Partner and affiliate tracking platform that networks run on

Quote-based, six-month minimum commitment

Raycast

Launcher for macOS with extensions, snippets and AI

Free; Pro $10/mo or $96/yr

Things 3

Personal task manager for Mac and iPhone, paid once

One-time: Mac $49.99, iPhone $9.99, iPad sold separately

Loom

Async screen recording with transcripts, shared by link

Free (25 videos, 5 min each); Business $18 per user per month

Arc

Chromium browser with spaces, profiles and a sidebar

Free; feature development stopped, Chromium updates only

NordVPN

Consumer VPN with apps for every device

see pricing page