These are the AI tools and services I actually use. Not sponsored. I pay for these with my own money and use them to help me run my business, create content, and automate the stuff I don't wanna do.
My main AI and the orchestrator for everything else. I live in Claude Code, the command line version, way more than the chat app. It plans the work, writes the code, and hands off pieces to the other agents. Writing, research, coding, brainstorming. Pretty much everything starts here.
My second opinion. When Claude does the work, GPT audits it. When GPT does the work, Claude audits it. Two different models catch way more than one model checking its own homework.
This is where I actually work. It's a terminal agent, so it can read my files, run commands, build tools, and fix its own mistakes instead of just talking about them. I keep a couple of them running at once and treat them like a small team.
My AI agent Fred runs on this. It's an open source coding agent I've built my own harness around. The trick that made it click: I split it into profiles. One for SEO, one for code, one for finance, and so on. Each profile has its own memory, its own skills, its own rules. So every lane is laser focused instead of one giant bot that's kinda okay at everything.
This is how I work from my iPad no matter where I am. I SSH into my main dev box, and all my agents live inside Herdr. I can close the iPad and walk away and everything keeps running. Come back an hour later and it's all right where I left it. The UI is also just nice for organizing workspaces and chats so I'm not digging through a pile of terminal tabs.
Turns audio into text. I use it to transcribe videos and voice notes. It's pretty fast and accurate. I even had Fred build me a script that connects to it so I can hold one button down on my keyboard and talk and it'll type it out. Massive time saver.
Gives Fred the ability to search the web. Free tier is plenty for what I need.
Bye bye SEMrush. This tool gives me all the SEO data I need. Keyword rankings, search volumes, SERP tracking. You can get everything you need for 3% the cost of something like Ahrefs or SEMrush. If you need backlinks, that can be a little pricier, but still far less than what you'd pay for one of the big SEO data companies.
Web scraping that actually works. Saves hours of manual research.
When you're scraping a lot of data or tracking competitors, you need these so you don't get blocked.
