The AI tools I actually pay for (and the free ones that beat them)

Happy Sunday,

Every “best AI tools” list online is the same: 47 tools, half of them affiliate links, none of them actually used by the person writing the list. So this isn’t that.

This is the short, honest version, the tools I personally pay for, the free ones that punch way above their weight, and the single rule I use before I add another subscription. I run content and automation for real clients, so I don’t have time for shiny toys that don’t earn their keep.

IN THIS EMAIL

» The handful of tools I actually pay for » The free tools that quietly beat paid ones » The one rule for deciding what’s worth it

💸 What I actually pay for

Short list on purpose.

A frontier AI model. ChatGPT or Claude, the paid tier. This is the one subscription I’d never cut. The gap between the free and paid models isn’t small, the paid versions reason better, follow instructions more closely, and handle bigger context. If AI touches your work daily, paying for the good model is the highest-ROI $20 you’ll spend. Pick one, learn it deeply, stop tool-hopping.

One automation tool. I run a lot through automation so leads and follow-ups don’t depend on me remembering. For that I lean on n8n and, for the client and pipeline side, GoHighLevel. The point isn’t the specific tool, it’s that the hour you spend wiring something up once buys back that hour every single week after.

That’s basically it for must-pay. Everything else, I’ll pay for only when it clears the rule at the bottom of this email.

🆓 The free tools that beat paid ones

Here’s where most people overspend.

DaVinci Resolve is free and it’s a genuine professional editor, the same tool used on actual films. People pay monthly for editors that do less. If you edit video, you almost certainly don’t need a subscription editor.

Canva’s free tier does 90% of what most people need for graphics, thumbnails, and carousels. You hit the paywall for specific assets, not for the core capability. Start free, upgrade only when a single feature is genuinely blocking you.

The free AI models are still incredible for low-stakes stuff, quick rewrites, brainstorming, formatting. You don’t need the paid tier to draft a caption. Save the good model for the work that actually matters.

The pattern: pay for the thing that does your highest-value work, and stop paying for the things where free is 90% as good.

🧠 The one rule

Before any subscription, I ask one question: will this save me at least an hour a week, or make me more than it costs?

If yes, it’s a no-brainer, time is the one thing you can’t buy back. If you can’t clearly answer yes, it’s a toy, and toys quietly drain your card every month while you tell yourself you’ll “get into it later.”

The other half of the rule: stop collecting tools. The person who knows one AI model deeply will out-produce the person with twelve subscriptions and no system, every time. Depth beats your tool stack.

So this week, do the boring thing: open your subscriptions, find the one you haven’t touched in 30 days, and cancel it. Then take that attention and go deeper on the one tool that actually moves your work forward.

• László

P.S. If your business is paying for a pile of tools that still don’t add up to a system that brings in clients, that’s the exact problem my team solves at Growth Lab Studios, one system instead of five vendors. If that’s you, start here.

P.P.S. Want the rest? Every past issue lives in the newsletter archive.