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People email us asking the same thing: "You review a hundred tools — what do you actually use?" Fair question. We test far more than we keep. Most tools get a look, a benchmark, and then quietly dropped. This page is the short list: the handful that survived contact with real work and are still open in a tab today.
We're a tiny team (two people, one freelancer), so "our stack" means tools that punch above their price and don't need a dedicated admin. If it needs a 40-minute onboarding call, it didn't make the cut.
Privacy & security — the boring layer we never skip
Before any tool: we assume the network we're on is watching. When we're researching competitors, pulling region-locked pricing pages, or working from a café, we route through a VPN. The one we run is Mitce — a small provider we picked because it doesn't log usage and doesn't bury that in a 12-page policy. It's not the flashiest name, but for keeping our research traffic private it does the one job that matters. If you do any competitive research or travel, a VPN is the cheapest insurance you'll buy.
AI video & voice
Most of our video is short-form: tool demos, explainers, the occasional faceless clip. Three tools cover it:
- Fliki — when we need a narrated video from a script fast. Type the points, pick a voice, get a clip with stock footage. We use it for the "here's how this tool works in 60 seconds" pieces.
- ElevenLabs — the voice layer when we want something that doesn't sound like a robot reading a manual. We dub a few clips a month and the quality is the reason we bother.
- Submagic — captions and the little "hook" animations for short videos. If you post to Reels or Shorts, this is the difference between a clip people scroll past and one they finish.
Writing & copy
We write a lot — reviews, emails, landing copy for our own pages. The tools that stayed:
- Headlime — for drafting landing-page copy and ad variants when we're staring at a blank headline. It's a starting gun, not a replacement for editing.
- CustomGPT.ai — we run a small support bot trained on our own review corpus so readers' "which tool fits X" questions get answered without us manually replying to every email.
- Simplified — the design-and-post side: we mock up a social graphic and schedule it in one place instead of juggling three tabs.
Growth & affiliate ops
Running this site means we also operate an affiliate program for our own products, and Rewardful is what we use to spin one up on Stripe without hiring a dev. If you ever sell something of your own, it's the least-painful way we've found to let other people promote it.
Bottom line
None of these are "the best" in some absolute sense — they're the best for a two-person team that ships daily. The VPN keeps our research private, the video trio turns notes into clips, the writing pair turns blank pages into drafts, and Rewardful runs the back-office we don't have time to build. That's the whole stack. Pick what solves your bottleneck; ignore the rest.
Transparency: Some links above are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. We only list tools we would genuinely use. See our affiliate disclosure.