🔗 Some links below are affiliate links - I may earn a small commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. I only list tools I genuinely use or thoroughly vet.
1. 📋 UseBasin
What I use it for: Custom form handling
- Handles all my contact and lead capture forms with no backend required
- Spam filtering is built in, so bots don’t flood my inbox
- Connects to Zapier for routing submissions, though I don’t use that yet
- Clean dashboard for reviewing and exporting entries
- 💰 Cost: $12.50/month (Starter, billed annually) | ✅ Free plan available (1 form, 50 submissions/mo, basic spam protection)
2. 🤖 GitHub Copilot Pro
What I use it for: Site customizations & content refinements
- Speeds up site tweaks and component edits without the constant context-switching
- Covers the full range of code tasks, from a markdown typo to tracking down a site issue
- I use VS Code as my editor, and the Copilot integration there is tight
- 💰 Cost: $10/month (Pro) | ✅ Free plan available (50 premium requests/month)
3. 🧠 TypingMind
What I use it for: AI model hub & prompt management
- Single interface for GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, and others, no tab-switching required
- Keeps prompts, projects, and conversations in one place. This one is genuinely hard to give up once you’re used to it
- Good for comparing model outputs side by side when researching articles
- You bring your own API keys, so costs stay separate and visible
- Works well for trying out MCP tools and custom prompt templates without needing to build your own setup
- Using the API directly gives better data control than platform chat tools, which matters depending on your usage policies
- 💰 Cost: One-time $99 (Premium lifetime license) | 🗄️ Optional storage for offsite sync across devices (1GB = $50/year, that plan is what I have and 1GB is plenty) | ❌ No monthly subscription for the app itself
4. 📧 Kit (ConvertKit)
What I use it for: Email list & newsletter
- Manages my subscriber list and sends newsletters without getting in the way
- Simple automation for welcome emails and drip content
- Clean editor that doesn’t fight you over templates
- Solid deliverability and a generous free tier
- 💰 Cost: $0/month (Newsletter free plan, up to 1,000 subscribers) | $33/month for the paid creator plan | ✅ Free plan available
5. 💻 Claude Code
What I use it for: Agentic coding & content work
- Runs in the terminal and understands the broader project context, not just the file you have open
- Takes some configuration to get the most out of it, but once it is set up it handles serious product work well
- You still need to know what you want. It reasons well, but it is not a replacement for thinking
- It has become central to how I work, both for building features and for content tasks I would not have touched with a coding tool a year ago
- 💰 Cost: Included in Claude Pro, $20/month | ❌ No free plan for Claude Code
6. 📬 Zoho Mail
What I use it for: Domain email hosting
ReviewTheStack is built on Astro and hosted on Netlify, which doesn’t include email hosting.
- Keeps business email on a custom domain without bundling it into a web hosting package I don’t need
- Mail Lite plan, ad-free interface
- Good privacy and full IMAP/POP access, so it works with any standard email client. That part is non-negotiable for me
- 💰 Cost: ~$1/month per user (Mail Lite 5GB plan, billed annually) | ❌ No free plan
7. 🚀 Netlify
What I use it for: Site hosting & deployments
- Deploys automatically on every GitHub push, no manual steps. That is a real quality-of-life difference from WordPress, where you are managing updates, plugins, and security on top of actually editing the site
TIP
If you are not a developer: you can push content changes to GitHub and trigger a deployment without needing to understand the full hosting setup. WordPress is not your only option.
AI can walk you through the parts you don’t know yet. You can get the benefits of a fast, secure, modern hosting setup without writing any server-side code yourself.
- Free plan has covered everything I need at current traffic levels
- Preview deployments let me sanity-check changes before they go live
- Nothing to manage, nothing to maintain
- 💰 Cost: $0/month (Free/Starter plan) | ✅ Free plan available
8. 🐙 GitHub
What I use it for: Private code repository & content backups
- All site code and content lives in private repos, so there is no separate backup solution to manage
- Every change is version controlled. If something breaks, rolling back is straightforward. You need basic
gitskills for this, but that is what AI is good at teaching - Reliable offsite backup with no extra effort
- Free for private repos, which covers everything here
- 💰 Cost: $0/month (Free plan) | ✅ Free plan available (unlimited private repos)
9. 🔍 Keywords Everywhere
What I use it for: Keyword research
- Shows search volume and CPC data inline as I search, no extra tab required
- Credit-based, so I pay for what I use rather than a flat monthly fee regardless of activity
- Good for quickly sizing up a topic before committing to it. Also useful for spotting where the big media sites have already locked up the rankings
- Not a full SEO suite, and I don’t need one. For light keyword research it earns its cost easily
- 💰 Cost: ~$7/month equivalent (Bronze plan, $84/year = 100,000 credits) | ❌ No free plan
💳 Approximate total per month: ~$50
(TypingMind was a one-time $99 purchase, not counted in recurring costs)
Last updated: April 2026. I’ll keep this page current as the stack changes.