Every week there’s a new “best AI tools” list. Most of them read like press releases.

I took a different approach: I actually used these tools for three months. Here’s what made it into my daily workflow.

My Current Stack

Claude — main writing and coding assistant. The 200K context window matters more than you think. I’ve dumped entire codebases into it and it just… works.

Cursor — all my code editing. Took me a week to get used to, now I can’t go back. The Composer feature (Cmd+I) lets me edit multiple files at once.

👉 Try Cursor Free

Perplexity — quick research and fact-checking. Better than Google for technical questions because it cites sources.

ChatGPT 4o — image analysis, brainstorming, debugging. The free tier gets you 10-20 GPT-4o messages every few hours.

DeepSeek — heavy batch processing when I don’t want to hit limits elsewhere. Completely free and surprisingly capable.

What Didn’t Make the Cut

Not every hyped tool is worth your time:

  • Copilot — fine for autocomplete, but Cursor does everything it does and more
  • Gemini — improved a lot, but still inconsistent for coding
  • Jasper / Copy.ai — these AI writing tools for marketers. If you’re a developer or creator, Claude or ChatGPT does it better for free

How I Actually Use These

A typical day looks like:

  1. Morning: Perplexity to catch up on dev news and research
  2. Mid-day: Cursor for coding, with Claude in the background for architecture questions
  3. Afternoon: ChatGPT for debugging and image analysis
  4. Evening: DeepSeek for batch processing or long-form analysis

Five tools, zero subscriptions. Well, I pay for Cursor Pro ($20/mo) but the free tier is generous enough for most people.

The Bottom Line

You don’t need to spend $200/month on AI tools. The free tiers of Claude, Cursor, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek cover 95% of what people actually do with AI.

Start with one, add more as you need them. Don’t fall for the FOMO.

Disclosure: Cursor link is an affiliate link. Everything else I mentioned is my genuine opinion.