I've tried dozens of AI tools over the past few months. New ones pop up every week and they all promise to change your life. Most of them don't. You sign up, play around for 20 minutes, and never open them again.

But a few of them stuck. These are the tools I genuinely open every single day. Not because they're trendy, but because they actually make my work faster and better.

Here's the honest list.

Claude

This is my daily thinking partner. I use Claude Pro ($20/month) for everything. Strategy, writing, brainstorming, planning content, working through ideas. It's like having a colleague who's always available and never gets tired of your questions.

I use it through Claude Desktop. Cowork mode for planning and thinking through problems. Code mode for actually building things. Between the two, it covers about 80% of what I need in a day.

VS Code

This is where I use Claude Code. It's free. The built-in terminal and file browser make everything easier when you're building with AI. You don't need to be a developer to use it. I'm not one, and I use it every day.

Remotion

Free AI video creation that runs inside Claude Code. I describe the video I want, Claude builds it, and I render it to MP4. No camera, no editing software, no timeline dragging. I've made animated explainers and social content this way, and each one takes under 10 minutes.

Canva

Carousels and graphics. Nothing groundbreaking here, but the brand kit feature is what makes it essential. Every piece of content stays consistent without me having to think about fonts and colours. I create all my Instagram carousels in Canva.

Blotato

This one is a game changer for content. Blotato lets me schedule and post to Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook directly from Claude Code. I can manage my entire content calendar without opening a single social media app. Write the content, schedule it, done.

ElevenLabs

AI voice generation. I use it for video voiceovers and voice agent projects. The voices sound natural, not robotic, and you can clone your own voice if you want consistency across content. It's surprisingly affordable for what you get.

Notion

My content ideas inbox. Ideas get pushed there automatically from my daily digest and trending tracker. When I sit down to create content, I just open Notion and pick from the list. No more "what should I post about today?" moments.

The real cost

Here's what surprised me most. My total monthly spend on this entire stack is under $50. Claude Pro is $20. Blotato is a small subscription. Everything else is either free or has a free tier that covers what I need.

A year ago, doing what I do now would have required a content team, a video editor, a social media manager, and a scheduling tool. Now it's just me and these seven tools.

That's not a sales pitch. That's literally what happened. The barrier to creating good content has dropped to almost nothing.

These aren't the flashiest tools. They're not the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They're just the ones that stuck after months of trying everything I could find.

I keep a full list of everything I use (including the ones I use weekly rather than daily) on my What I Use page.

If you want to know more about any of them, or how I set them up, DM me @reallyusefulai on Instagram.