Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
AI Tools I Actually Pay For
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items Not affiliate links. Not "game-changer" influencer BS. These are the tools I put my own credit card down for every single month. Brutally honest tradeoffs included because every tool has warts.
$20/mo | Best AI code editor period. Tab completion is actual witchcraft. Composer ships features in one prompt. Still hallucinates imports. Still worth it. Read every diff.
Cursor: The best way to code with AI
$20/mo | Swiss Army knife. GPT-4o is fast. Canvas is useful. Custom GPTs are great for repetitive prompt chains. Jack of all trades, master of none — but the breadth is the value.
ChatGPT Plan | Plus
$20/mo | King for coding and long-form analysis. The 200k context window isn't a gimmick — dumping entire codebases and getting coherent answers is wild. Rate limits hit HARD during marathon sessions. Plan around them.
Introducing Claude Pro - Anthropic
$22/mo | Only TTS that doesn't sound like a 2015 GPS navigation. Essential for voice bots. Credit burn is real — every iteration on a voice eats quota. The quality gap vs. free TTS is a canyon.
ElevenLabs: Free AI Voice Generator & Voice Agents Platform
The best AI voice generator on the market. Natural voices, voice cloning, and the new Voice Agents platform. I use this for all my voiceover work. Free tier is generous for testing.
ElevenLabs: Free AI Voice Generator & Voice Agents Platform
$20/mo | Replaced 80% of my Google searches. Claude + real-time web grounding is the killer combo. Occasionally cites hallucinated sources with full confidence so verify anything important.
Perplexity AI
$10/mo | Still unmatched for pure aesthetic quality. Bot avatars, social assets, UI mockups, inspiration. Discord-first UX was genuinely maddening for years. The web editor finally makes it usable.
Midjourney
$9/mo | Zero-rate-limit inference API. Run open-source models without GPU bills. Documentation is a maze and SDK breaking changes are common. Worth it if you know what you're doing.
Hugging Face – The AI community building the future.
$5-50/mo usage-based | Single API key accesses 200+ models. Swap models without touching a line of code. 10-20% latency overhead is the tradeoff. Essential if you're building AI agents.
OpenRouter
Free self-hosted / 20/mo cloud | Open-source Zapier with native AI nodes. Wire LLMs to Telegram, email, webhooks, databases - all visual. Debugging complex workflows is a dark art. Save often.
AI Workflow Automation Platform - n8n
$20/mo | Fullstack apps from a single prompt running in your browser. Admin panels, internal tools, MVPs. Over-engineers simple layouts. Treat it as a prototyping weapon, not a production deployer.
Bolt AI builder: Websites, apps & prototypes
Free | The sleeper hit. Gemini 2.5 Pro with 1M token context for zero dollars. Great for processing massive documents. Google's best-kept secret right now.
Google AI Studio 2026 : avis, tarifs et guide complet - Noxcod
Vercel's AI dev tool that generates production Next.js UI from prompts. Built on shadcn/ui + Tailwind. Faster than coding by hand for landing pages and dashboards.
v0 by Vercel - Build Full-Stack Web Apps with AI
Run open-source AI models via cloud API without managing GPUs. Pay-per-second pricing means no monthly fees. I use this for Flux image gen, Whisper transcriptions, and Llama experiments.
Replicate - Run AI with an API
AI music generation that creates actual songs with vocals and instrumentation. I use this for background tracks in video projects. The v4 model handles complex genres surprisingly well.
Suno - AI Songs & Music - App Store
Suno - AI Songs & Music - App Store