Tools worth
your attention.

C Freemium ChatGPT The default general assistant. Good at drafting, bad at knowing when it is wrong. C Freemium Claude Long-context assistant that handles messy documents and code review well. P Freemium Perplexity Answers with citations attached, so you can check the claim instead of trusting it. G Freemium Gemini Google's assistant, strongest when the work already lives in Docs or Sheets. N Free NotebookLM Upload your own sources and question them. Citations point back to the paragraph. E Freemium Elicit Reads academic papers in bulk and extracts findings into a comparable table. C Freemium Consensus Asks whether the studies agree. Useful for sanity-checking a health or science claim. H Freemium Hugging Face Model hub and demo space. The fastest way to try a model without renting a GPU. F Freemium Figma Interface design with real multiplayer editing. Still the team default. C Freemium Canva Fast social graphics and decks when nobody needs a design system. F Freemium Framer Design a marketing site and publish it from the same canvas. P Free Photopea Photoshop in a browser tab. Opens PSD files, no install, no account. C Freemium Coolors Generates palettes and checks contrast. Good for escaping a colour rut. U Free Unsplash Free-to-use photography that does not look like stock photography. E Free Excalidraw Hand-drawn style diagrams. Opens instantly, which is the whole point. L Freemium LottieFiles Lightweight animated JSON for interfaces, plus a marketplace of ready ones. G Freemium GitHub Where the code lives. Actions and Codespaces are included on free plans. V Freemium Vercel Push a frontend repo, get a preview URL per branch. Zero config for most frameworks. C Freemium Cloudflare DNS, CDN, Pages and Workers on one free tier. This site runs on it. S Freemium Supabase Postgres with auth, storage and row-level security wired in. R Paid Railway Deploy a backend without writing a Dockerfile or reading a YAML schema. P Freemium Postman Build and share API requests. Still the clearest way to debug a JSON body. S Freemium Sentry Error tracking with stack traces and release markers. Tells you what broke, not just that it did. R Free Regex101 Explains a regex token by token and shows what each capture group matched. N Freemium Notion Docs, databases and wikis in one workspace. Easy to start, easy to overbuild. O Freemium Obsidian Local Markdown notes with backlinks. Your vault is a folder you own. L Freemium Linear Issue tracking fast enough to use during a meeting. Keyboard-first throughout. R Freemium Raycast Launcher, clipboard history, window manager and snippets in one keystroke. T Freemium Todoist Natural-language task entry that works the same on every platform. C Freemium Cal.com Open-source scheduling links. Self-hostable, which Calendly is not. L Freemium Loom Screen recording with a link at the end. Replaces a lot of status meetings. 1 Paid 1Password Password manager with solid sharing for families and small teams. G Freemium Grammarly Inline grammar and tone fixes wherever you type. Overcorrects on technical prose. D Freemium DeepL Translation that keeps the sentence structure of the target language. H Freemium Hemingway Editor Highlights the long sentences and passive voice you were hoping nobody noticed. L Freemium LanguageTool Open-source proofreading in 30+ languages, with a self-hosted option. O Freemium Otter.ai Meeting transcription with speaker labels and a searchable summary. R Paid Readwise Resurfaces your highlights on a schedule, so saved articles actually get read twice. I Paid iA Writer Distraction-free Markdown editor with a focus mode that dims everything else. B Freemium Bear Markdown notes with a genuinely pleasant typographic default. G Free Google Flights Fastest way to compare fares, with a date grid that shows what shifting a day saves. R Free Rome2Rio Shows every way to get between two places, with time and cost for each. T Free Trip.com Hotels, trains and flights across Asia, with English support that actually answers. S Free Seat61 One man's exhaustive guide to doing Europe and Asia by rail. No ads, no filler. W Freemium Wise Multi-currency account at the mid-market rate, with a card that works abroad. A Paid Airalo eSIM data packs by country. Land with connectivity instead of hunting for a SIM shop. W Freemium Wanderlog Builds a day-by-day itinerary on a map, with travel time between stops. T Freemium TripIt Forward a booking email and get one clean itinerary. Still unbeaten at that one job. D Freemium DiDi Ride hailing that works where Uber does not, including most Chinese cities. A Free Amap Accurate public transport and walking routes in China, where foreign maps go stale. P Paid Plausible Cookie-free analytics in a single page. No consent banner required in most cases. G Free Google Search Console The only place that shows the queries you actually rank for, and what broke. A Paid Ahrefs Backlink and keyword data with a crawler that keeps up. Expensive but hard to replace. B Freemium Beehiiv Newsletter platform built around growth: referrals, boosts and a web archive. B Freemium Buffer Queue posts across networks and stop opening six tabs to publish one thing. Z Freemium Zapier Connects the apps that will never ship an integration. Glue, not architecture. H Freemium Hotjar Heatmaps and session replays. Watch five recordings before redesigning anything. M Freemium Mailchimp The default email list tool. Fine until the list gets big, then check the pricing. T Freemium TinyPNG Compresses PNG and JPEG with no visible loss. Drop files, download, done. S Free Squoosh Side-by-side image compression with the codec and quality exposed. C Freemium CloudConvert Converts between almost any two file formats, including video and audio. B Freemium Bitwarden Open-source password manager with a free tier that covers most people. W Freemium WeTransfer Sends large files by link without an account on either end. A Free archive.today Permanently snapshots a page, paywalls included. Essential for citing anything. S Free Speedtest The one everyone uses. Check before blaming the server. P Free PDF24 Merge, split, compress and OCR PDFs in the browser without uploading to a stranger.