These days, every other website has a list of AI tools. Most of them are copied: tools in alphabetical order, a line about the intuitive interface for each, and no sign the author ever opened them. This list is different in one way. These are the eight tools I have running every morning, and for each one, I also tell you where it falls short.
I’ve read a few of those roundups myself and came away empty-handed every time. They were missing the one thing I need to know: what someone actually did with the tool and how much they pay for it, month after month.
Eight tools and the one rule I pick them by
A tool only stays if it takes a specific job off my plate. Being interesting or talked about doesn’t count. If after a month I can’t see exactly what stopped being my job, I cancel it.
I read the prices below on the official pricing pages on September 19, 2026. For three tools, I leave the price out on purpose: I couldn’t verify their pricing as of that date, and a guessed number is worse than none.
| Tool | What I use it for | Free | Paid entry plan (September 19, 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | writing from your own materials | yes, limited | Pro, $20 a month |
| Claude Code | working with files, and agents | no | included in Claude plans |
| Wispr Flow | dictation instead of typing | pricing not verified | price not listed |
| tl;dv | recording and summarizing meetings | yes | Pro, €29 a month |
| ElevenLabs | voiceovers in my own voice | 10,000 credits | Starter, $6 a month |
| Apify | data from other websites | pricing not verified | price not listed |
| n8n | connecting apps to each other | on your own server | Starter, €20 a month |
| fal.ai | images in a consistent style | pricing not verified | price not listed |
In short: two tools write for me and do the work, three collect inputs (voice, meetings, web data), and three produce outputs (voice, images, connections between apps).
Credits
A unit some tools bill in instead of minutes or number of actions. You only find out how many a task used once it’s finished, which makes your monthly spend hard to estimate. Comparing a pricing page that counts credits with one that charges per action makes no sense.
Forget the priciest subscription. The most expensive tool is the one you’ve paid for six months without it taking anything off your desk.
Claude: writing from your own materials
Claude is the window where I upload my own materials and have it write a long piece in Czech based on them.
Best for: proposals, meeting notes, methodologies, and any text that should come from your own materials rather than the internet.
Every day, it gets my call notes, client materials, and half-finished drafts. The answer sticks to what I gave it and doesn’t fill the gaps with guesses. The longer the source material, the bigger the difference compared with a general web search.
Where it falls short: even on paid plans you’ll hit hourly usage limits, so it’s better to spread long work out than to push through it in one go.
Price as of September 19, 2026: there’s a free version, Pro costs $20 a month ($17 billed annually), Max starts at $100, and a team license comes to $25 per seat.
Claude Code: working with files, and agents in the background
Claude Code gives you a finished piece of work instead of an answer. It goes into your files, works through them, and puts the result in front of you for approval.
Best for: repetitive work that takes the same shape every time: monthly reports, bulk edits, preparing documents.
That’s how I now produce most of the things I used to click through by hand. I write the instructions in plain Czech, and I get the result to review, not to finish.
Where it falls short: it runs in a terminal or a code editor, which scares a lot of people off before they type their first sentence.
Price as of September 19, 2026: you don’t pay for it separately. It’s part of the paid Claude plans, and you won’t find it in the free version.
Wispr Flow: dictation instead of typing
Wispr Flow turns my speech into text right in whatever window I’m in, so I say my instructions instead of typing them.
Best for: long instructions, notes right after a call, and replies that would take ten minutes to type.
Most of what I put in over a day started out spoken. Of all eight, it saves me the most time, and it’s also the hardest to explain until you try it. I wrote about it in detail in my article on dictating instead of typing.
Where it falls short: it mangles names, foreign words, and technical terms, so I always skim the text afterward.
Price: not listed. I couldn’t verify the pricing from an official source as of September 19, 2026, so check it yourself.
tl;dv: meeting recordings and summaries
tl;dv records a call, transcribes it, and turns it into a summary you can come back to anytime.
Best for: consultations and client calls where agreements, numbers, and deadlines come up.
What I use most is the archive. When I’m not sure a month later what we agreed on, I search the transcript instead of my memory. In my piece on the meetings AI remembers for me, I describe how an archive like that turns into something that answers your questions.
Where it falls short: with long calls, only part of the conversation makes it into the transcript, so I check the length right after the call, not when I need the transcript.
Price as of September 19, 2026: there’s a free plan, Pro costs €29 a month (€18 billed annually), and Business €39 (€29 billed annually).
ElevenLabs: a voice that sounds like mine
ElevenLabs reads any text aloud in my own cloned voice.
Best for: audio versions of written content, video voiceovers, and foreign-language versions where the speaker should still be recognizable.
It narrates my articles, so people can listen to them in the car. I wrote up how to get a clone like that, and what it can and can’t do, in my piece on the voice clone that narrates my articles.
Where it falls short: regenerating the same sentence costs the full price again, so it pays to have the text final before you start recording.
Price as of September 19, 2026: 10,000 credits free, Starter $6 a month (30,000 credits), Creator $11 (121,000), Pro $99 (600,000). The pricing page lists 74 languages, Czech among them, and it works.
Voice clone
A synthetic voice built from a recording of yours. It reads any text with your tone and pace, so an audio version of a text needs neither a microphone nor a quiet afternoon. You make it once and keep using it.
Apify: data from other websites without copying by hand
Apify collects structured data from websites that I’d otherwise have to copy one item at a time.
Best for: competitor prices, reviews, public contact details, and monitoring changes on other people’s sites.
I use it to pull material that would otherwise take hours to gather. I show what you can get from the web and where the limits are in my article on web data without copy and paste.
Where it falls short: you pay for compute time, so one badly configured job can get surprisingly expensive. I always set a cap on the number of results.
Price: not listed. I don’t have its pricing verified as of September 19, 2026.
How I choose
A new tool only gets real work once I can answer yes to three questions: will it save me at least an hour this week, can it do what I need in Czech, and can I get my data out if I cancel it? If any answer is no, it stays in the testing phase and never gets to real work.
n8n: connecting apps so nothing gets retyped
n8n moves information between apps, so nobody has to retype it from one into the other.
Best for: a business that wants its automations and their data on its own server rather than with a vendor.
It holds together the links between systems that otherwise wouldn’t talk to each other. An order creates a contact, a finished item asks for approval, a watchdog alerts me when something didn’t run.
Where it falls short: the software is free, but the server, backups, and updates aren’t. Those cost you time, or money paid to someone else.
Price as of September 19, 2026: the Community Edition is free on your own server, Starter is €20 a month billed annually (2,500 executions), and Pro €50 (10,000 executions).
What I left behind
I used Make.com for years, and I’m gradually moving my scenarios from it to my own server. The price is fine, by the way: the Core plan costs $9 a month, checked on September 19, 2026. The real reason is that since 2025, Make has billed in credits instead of operations, and my usage estimates drifted away from reality. If running your own server isn’t worth the hassle for you, I still recommend Make.
fal.ai: images that hold one style
fal.ai produces images that keep the same signature look across hundreds of pieces.
Best for: article thumbnails, illustrations, and visuals where the brand should be recognizable.
That’s where the images for everything I publish come from. I describe how to tune a style and why it pays to freeze it once in my article on images in your own style.
Where it falls short: a consistent style doesn’t happen by itself. You have to tune it and then stick to it strictly, or every image ends up with a different mood.
Price: not listed. I don’t have its pricing verified as of September 19, 2026.
Who this list won’t help at all
Eight tools won’t pay off if you’re looking for one that does everything. No such tool exists, and looking for it costs more than all eight put together.
They also won’t help if your work doesn’t repeat. Each of these eight earns its keep because the same thing gets done often. For a one-off task, it’s faster to do it by hand and spare yourself one more thing to manage.
And one thing I’ll advise against right away: getting all eight at once. Take one, the one for the job that costs you the most time this week. For me, that was dictation, and it’s still the tool that saves me the most.
The whole selection process in a nutshell
- List the three jobs that cost you the most time every week.
- For the first one, pick one tool, not three.
- Check two things: that it handles your language and that you can get your data out of it.
- Open the pricing page right before you buy. Prices move in months, not years.
- After a month, check whether that job got shorter. If it didn’t, cancel without regret.
The eight windows I open every morning didn’t end up there by accident or because I like collecting tools. Each one took over a job that used to be done by hand. The tools alone don’t solve anything, though. The real work is connecting them so they pass data to each other, and that’s exactly what I do for clients. You can tell a good tool by something other than its feature list: after a month, you forget it’s there, because the job simply disappeared.
