I hit AppSumo at 2am Melbourne time on a Tuesday. Impulse-bought three tools I’d been eyeing. Refunded one by Wednesday. Here’s what actually made it through the 2-hour test.

Amical — the dictation tool I didn’t know I needed

Founded July 2025, Vancouver. Bootstrapped. That alone caught my eye. Most speech-to-text tools are either Otter wrappers or they’re charging a subscription forever. Amical is building its own AI stack.

Paid $49 lifetime for Tier 1. The pitch was simple — stop typing, start dictating. Context-aware formatting across 100+ languages. Works offline on your device, or cloud if you want speed.

Installed it Wednesday. Tested it in Gmail, Slack, a Google Doc. Accuracy was crisp. The context-aware formatting is genuinely good — it knows when you’re writing an email vs a Slack message and formats accordingly. One community reviewer flagged slow TestFlight invites. Not my problem post-purchase.

29 of 33 reviews are 5 tacos. Two friction points in the community: accuracy hiccups on regional accents (one reviewer, one case) and a wish list for more language-specific custom vocabularies. Neither killed it for me.

Keeping it. I’ll use it for voice notes on client calls and drafting long-form content. Saves keyboard time — and keyboard time is my actual bottleneck.

Topical Map AI — the one I refunded

$69 on AppSumo. Supposed to build AI topical maps with clustered keywords, live search data, and content briefs. I was curious because I do this manually for LoudCow — mapping content clusters, spotting gaps.

Ran a test query on “WordPress hosting Australia.” Got back a basic keyword cluster and a content brief. Format was clean. Then I tried to export, modify, iterate — and the friction started. Can’t bulk-edit clusters. Can’t merge related keywords into tighter groups. Can’t sync the output to my content calendar.

One user nailed it: “It looks pretty but doesn’t talk to your CMS.” Another said search data sometimes lags 24 hours. For $69, I need it to save me real time or get out of the way. It did neither.

Refunded inside 2 hours. Keeping my manual process. It’s slower but it’s mine.

DM Champ — still watching this one

Didn’t buy this directly. Watched the reviews stack up over three weeks — 60 reviews, mostly 5 tacos. The pitch is bold: resell a white-label AI sales agent to your clients and keep 100% of the profit.

That’s not quite right. You keep maybe 60-70% after cuts and support costs. But the core angle is interesting. It’s a Messenger-based AI agent you can white-label and resell. One reviewer put it well: “Finally something I can actually resell without rebuilding from scratch.”

Friction points the community flagged: no custom domain included, limited API access, training your agent requires CSV uploads rather than live integrations. One user wanted Slack integration out of the box and didn’t get it.

I build my own sales agents on Base44, so the white-label margin isn’t compelling enough for me personally. But if you’ve got clients and zero interest in building AI agents yourself, $59 lifetime is a reasonable gamble. I’m watching it.

What actually sticks from AppSumo

The deals that earn a permanent spot are the ones that remove friction from my real workflow. Amical does that — one tap instead of typing. DM Champ is interesting but not urgent. Topical Map AI tried to solve a problem I’ve already solved differently.

The 2-hour test is non-negotiable. If a tool doesn’t save time or unlock something I couldn’t do before, it goes back. AppSumo’s 60-day guarantee means you can be genuinely ruthless about this. Use it.

Next week I’m looking at Pixefy and Prompt Architects. Will report back.

Find your own gems at AppSumo. 60-day money-back guarantee — no shame in refunding.

Building an AI agent or WordPress site for your business? Let’s talk →

FAQ

Written by a human. Affiliate links may apply. Nuffin’s for free. If you buy through my AppSumo link, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

I’ve been on Google Workspace since before it was called Google Workspace. It’s the one tool I’ve never once considered replacing — and I’ve replaced almost everything else at least twice.

— Catie Hughes, LoudCow

Gmail. Drive. Meet. Calendar. Docs. Sheets. All of it, under one roof, on one bill, from any device. That’s Google Workspace — and more than 5 million businesses run on it every day.

I’m one of them. Have been for years. Here’s why I recommend it to every client who asks.

What is Google Workspace

It’s a cloud-based productivity suite. That’s the official description. In practice, it’s the thing that means you can start an email on your phone at the airport and finish it on your laptop at your desk without any of it going wrong.

Custom email for your domain. Shared calendars. Video meetings. 30GB+ of cloud storage per user. Real-time document collaboration. All of it talking to each other, all of it backed by Google’s security infrastructure.

Starting at AU $8.40 per user per month.

What you actually get

Professional email on your own domain

yo*@*********ny.com instead of yo*********@***il.com. Small detail. Big difference. Gmail handles the heavy lifting — 30GB inbox, smart filtering, works with Outlook if your clients are Microsoft people.

Your calendar, finally under control

Google Calendar finds meeting times that work for everyone. Reminders land in your Gmail. Your team sees each other’s availability without a back-and-forth email chain. It just works.

Files that follow you everywhere

Google Drive means the file you saved at your desk is on your phone when you’re standing in a client’s office. Edit together in real time. No emailing attachments back and forth. No “which version is this” confusion.

How much does it cost?

Three tiers for small business. All include custom email, Meet, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets and Slides.

• Business Starter — 30GB storage per user. Good for solo operators and small teams.
• Business Standard — 2TB storage per user. Meet recordings. Better for growing teams who run a lot of calls.
• Business Plus — 5TB storage, enhanced security and compliance. For businesses that need the extra controls.

All plans start with a 14-day free trial — no credit card required to start.

Why I recommend it to LoudCow clients

I’ve set up a lot of tools for a lot of businesses. Most of them require a learning curve, a migration headache, or a moment six months in where you realise it doesn’t quite do the thing you needed.

Google Workspace doesn’t do that. Your team already knows Gmail. They already know Docs. The learning curve is basically zero. You get enterprise-level admin controls — user management, device security, account recovery — without needing an IT department to run them.

And it plays nicely with WordPress, with Zapier, with basically everything else in your stack. It’s not trying to be the only thing you use. It just makes everything else easier.

Start your free trial

Use my referral link for a 14-day free trial. Message me once you’re in and I’ll sort you out with an exclusive discount when you subscribe.

Message Catie →

Common questions

Written by a human. Affiliate links may apply. Nuffin’s for free. If you sign up to Google Workspace via my referral link, I may receive a payment at no extra cost to you.

There are two feelings that AI gives me. Sometimes in the same afternoon.

The first one is dread. That quiet, low-level hum of what exactly am I for? It creeps in when you watch a machine do something in four minutes that you’d have spent four days on. When a client asks “can’t AI just do that?” and you realise, uncomfortably, that it probably can. When you open a research paper and it takes your breath away — not because it’s complicated, but because a computer wrote it.

Is there any point to me anymore? Haha!

The second feeling is the opposite. It’s the closest thing I’ve experienced to having actual superpowers. The day I realised I could build a functioning web app in an afternoon. The moment a piece of copy came back so close to right I barely touched it – ouch! But oh….. The workflow that used to take a week now takes a morning.

Same tool. Same week. Completely opposite feelings.

I’ve been sitting with that tension for a while now. And then I read something that helped.

An 80-year-old Math problem. Figured out by OpenAI in approx 32 hours. What they hey?

In 1946, a Hungarian mathematician named Paul Erdős posed a question. Simple to explain. Apparently impossible to resolve.

Draw some dots on a piece of paper. How many pairs of those dots can sit exactly one unit apart? Erdős worked out a clever grid construction that maximised the count. Then he made a conjecture — essentially, that his approach was the best anyone could do. That no configuration of dots could beat it.

Here’s why that matters — and why a 10-year-old actually gets this faster than most adults.

Imagine you’re at a birthday party. There are 20 kids in the backyard. You want to find out how many pairs of kids are standing exactly one metre apart. Easy enough with 20 kids. Now imagine a million kids. The question becomes what’s the smartest way to arrange them so the maximum number of pairs are standing exactly one metre apart?

Erdős worked out the cleverest arrangement. Then said — and this is the important bit — no arrangement can ever do better than this. That’s not just a maths claim. That’s a statement about the limits of the possible. He was drawing a line and saying nothing can cross it.

Every mathematician who came after him looked at that line and nodded. Made sense. Seemed right. So they spent their careers trying to prove the line was real — not wondering if maybe, just maybe, there was a gap in the fence.

That’s not a maths problem. That’s a people problem. Experts trust other experts. Nobody wants to be the one who wasted years chasing something the smartest person in the room already ruled out.

For 80 years, every mathematician who looked at this problem agreed with him. They spent their careers trying to prove Erdős right. Nobody seriously tried to prove him wrong. He was Erdős. You don’t walk into a seminar room and announce that one of the greatest mathematicians in history missed something obvious.

Last month, OpenAI fed the problem to a general-purpose reasoning model. Not a specialist maths AI. Not a system trained specifically on geometry. A general reasoner.

It disproved Erdős. Hundreds of pages of logic. A new construction using tools from algebraic number theory — a completely different branch of mathematics — mapped back down to the 2D plane. A result no human had ever attempted, using methods that had existed for decades.

The mathematicians who verified the proof were stunned. Fields medalist Tim Gowers called it “a milestone in AI mathematics.” He said if a human had submitted the same proof to the Annals of Mathematics, he’d have recommended acceptance without hesitation.

Jacob Tsimerman from the University of Toronto put it plainly —

“AIs have an edge — it’s not just that they can try all known methods. They can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without getting overwhelmed.”

And Harvard mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood said something that stopped me cold —

“If all the experts assembled after the fact had instead spent the same time seeking a counterexample, they would have found one. Maybe people should be spending more time playing devil’s advocate.”

Read that again.

The solution was always there. The tools existed. Nobody tried — not because they lacked the ability, but because they assumed the expert was right. Because the social cost of being wrong in public was too high. Because specialising in a field means inheriting all of its assumptions.

AI had none of that baggage. It just tried the thing.

OK but why does solving it actually matter?

Here’s the honest answer. On its own, this particular proof won’t change your life tomorrow.

But the type of problem it is — that matters everywhere.

The birthday party question is really asking, given a fixed group of things, what’s the smartest possible arrangement to maximise connections between them? That question shows up constantly. In how cities design mobile phone tower coverage. In how Spotify decides which songs sit close enough together in taste to recommend one after the other. In how Google maps the relationships between billions of web pages to decide which one is most relevant to you.

Every recommendation engine. Every ad targeting algorithm. Every “people you may know” feature on LinkedIn. All of them are versions of the same question Erdős was asking in 1946 — just with more dots, faster computers, and a lot more money on the line.

For 80 years, everyone assumed there was a ceiling on how well you could solve it. AI just proved the ceiling was wrong. Which means every system built on that assumption has room to get better.

That’s why mathematicians are excited. Not because of the dots. Because of what comes next.

I think.

Honestly, I have NFI.

I’m a digital marketer from Melbourne who got completely side-tracked down a maths rabbit hole at 11pm on a Sunday night.

All I know for certain is this — it’s a god dang pretty design. And when the news dropped, some of the smartest mathematicians on the planet had to have a Bex and a lie down.

That reaction alone tells you something important happened.

What this has to do with you and me

Pause for a second and think about the mathematicians. The ones who spent 40 years on a problem like this. Colleagues of Erdős. People who shaped entire fields. People who gave their careers to questions most of us couldn’t even read, let alone answer.

How do they feel right now?

I’m not being glib. It’s a real question. Because it’s the same question that accountants, lawyers, copywriters, developers, and designers are quietly asking themselves. What happens when the thing you spent decades mastering gets democratised in a Tuesday afternoon session with a chatbot?

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m not going to pretend I do.

But I do have a reframe. And it starts with something I used to think was a weakness.

Jack of all trades

For most of my career, I’ve known a little about a lot.

I’ve taught myself stuff I had no business knowing about.

WordPress. Marketing. Design. Copywriting. Automation. Hosting. Client management. Project delivery. A bit of code when I need it. Not enough of any one thing to call myself a specialist. Enough of all of them to make things work.

Traditional career advice hates this profile. Pick a lane. Go deep. Build expertise. The generalist is a threat to no one and valued by few.

I believed that for a long time. It felt like a character flaw dressed up as a career.

Then AI arrived and quietly inverted the whole argument.

Here’s the thing about prompting an AI well. You have to know enough about the output to judge whether it’s any good. A generalist does. The person who understands marketing and copy and design can look at what came back and know what’s missing. The specialist in one field gets a confident wrong answer and can’t always tell.

Think about making a film. The best director isn’t the best actor, the best camera operator, or the best screenwriter. The best director is the person who understands all three well enough to get the best out of each of them. They’re the translator. The conductor. The one holding the whole picture.

That’s not a specialist skill. That’s a generalist skill. And AI just made it the most valuable skill in the room.

What the mathematicians actually needed

Go back to the Erdős proof for a moment.

After the AI produced its result, five mathematicians with completely different specialisations had to verify and improve it. A number theorist. A combinatorialist. A geometer. A complexity theorist. Each one understood a different piece. Will Sawin at Princeton has already improved on the AI’s result.

None of them could have done it alone. But someone had to know enough about each domain to know who to call. To understand what the AI had actually done. To translate between the different mathematical languages in the room.

That’s not deep specialist knowledge. That’s the ability to hold the whole picture.

The AI didn’t replace the mathematicians. It handed them something none of them would have tried on their own. They had to synthesise it together.

That’s the model. That’s what working with AI actually looks like — not replacement, but a new kind of collaboration that rewards the person who can move between worlds.

The part where I admit the dread is still real

I’m not going to wrap this up with a bow and tell you it’s all fine.

Some of what AI does is genuinely confronting. There are things I used to charge for that I now use as prompts. Skills I spent years developing that a well-structured question can approximate in seconds. The ground shifts regularly, and there’s no pretending otherwise.

The dread comes back. Sometimes on a Monday. Sometimes mid-project.

But so does the other feeling. The superpowers one.

And increasingly I think the difference between the two — which one wins on any given Tuesday — comes down to how you’re positioned. The specialist asks can AI do what I do? That question has an increasingly uncomfortable answer.

The generalist asks what can I direct AI to do that I couldn’t do alone? That question keeps getting more interesting.

Now. About that image at the top of this post.

I’ve been looking for a hero artwork piece for my brick wall in my Fitzroy warehouse conversion for six months. Nothing has felt right. I kept looking at prints and installations and thinking close, but not quite.

Last week, in the middle of reading about the Erdős proof, I saw what the AI’s solution actually looks like when you plot it.

I think I might have it printed on my wall. I could stare at this for hours. This represents so much about right now in the age of AI.

The unit distance problem — n dots, exactly one unit apart. Source: OpenAI — An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

That’s what a disproved 80-year-old conjecture looks like when you render it. A dot grid that took 80 years to produce. Beautiful, precise, and completely counterintuitive.

The same AI that makes you feel obsolete on a Tuesday can hand you the most beautiful thing you’ve ever put on your wall by Friday.

That’s the deal. Learn to work with it.

Heads up — some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Nuffin’s for free, right? This post was written by me, a human, after actual research and real tool-testing. AI helps me with the grunt work. The opinions are still mine.

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

A few years ago I wrote my first post on this exact topic — on a brand new site I built myself using a WordPress AI builder. My own one. The question then was the same as it is now.

Should I bail on WordPress?

I’m still asking it. Every day.

Right now I’m deep in Base44 building apps for clients — a real cost calculator for realcost.au, accounting automation tools that take the repetitive grunt work out of their week, a CRM I put together and could sell for $750 a pop. I’ve built custom GPTs for clients. I’ve integrated AI chatbots directly into WordPress via AI Engine. I’m currently in the thick of Claude Cowork and Claude Code and seeing possibilities that genuinely don’t stop.

Every tool I pick up gives me that feeling. The oh my god, what is this feeling. The same one I got 16 years ago when I clicked a button on DreamHost and a WordPress dashboard appeared and I didn’t sleep for two days working out DNS and plugins and why the hell everything looked broken in Internet Explorer.

The difference now is I’m not just a person who builds websites. I’m a person who’s thinking about employees. About what I’m actually selling. About whether the thing I’ve built my entire business on is still the right foundation — or whether I’m the last person defending a castle that’s already been surrounded.

So. OpenAI. Anthropic. Google. Which one? And where does WordPress fit in any of it?

I’m training up on Gemini Enterprise now. Makes sense — I’ve been a Google Workspace user and reseller for years. I’m a Google native who got seduced by Claude’s no-code promise. And now I have to actually choose. Because I’m only human. I can only become genuinely expert in one area. And I need to know that the area I choose is still worth building on.

I did the research. Properly. Here’s what I found — and what I decided.

The honest case against WordPress right now.

Let’s not dress this up.

Wix grew its market share by 32.6% in a single year. AI-first builders — Framer, Durable, Hostinger AIM, the whole Generation 4.0 crowd — can produce something functional, designed, and live in minutes. The experience is electric. I understand completely why a small business owner looks at that and never looks at a WordPress dashboard.

And here’s the part that actually rattles me. My whole offering has always been about giving SMEs the ability to update their own website content. Autonomously. Without needing me. That’s the pitch. That’s the value.

Wix does that on day one. No training required.

So why am I still here?

Because autonomy has a second act. And that’s where it gets expensive.

Every closed AI builder is a closed ecosystem. You don’t own your website. You rent it.

The moment a business outgrows the platform — wants a custom AI integration, a proper WooCommerce setup, a connection to their CRM, or just the freedom to change hosting providers — they hit a wall. There is no export button. There’s no migration tool. There’s a very expensive manual rebuild.

Professional migration off Wix? The research puts it at $1,000 to $6,000+. Plus SEO damage if the URL structure changes and it’s not handled perfectly. Years of search ranking, gone.

WordPress’s own community has a name for what happens to these businesses. They call it the “technical dead-end.” They even launched a formal project — the Data Liberation Project, announced at State of the Word 2025 — specifically to rescue businesses from these platforms.

The WordPress community built a rescue operation for people who chose the platform that was supposed to replace WordPress. That tells you something.

The real numbers. What this actually costs.

Wix looks cheaper. Until you want to leave.

And every serious business eventually wants to leave. Because serious businesses grow. They add functions. They need integrations. They want AI agents that connect to their actual systems — not just the ones the platform approves.

WordPress doesn’t have an exit cost. Because you own it.

What WordPress is actually doing about AI. This is the part that settled it.

WordPress 7.0 shipped in May 2026 with a foundational, provider-agnostic AI architecture. A unified PHP AI client that lets developers connect to any model — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, whatever comes next. One connectors screen. No lock-in to any single AI provider.

That last bit matters enormously to me right now, as I’m sitting here trying to decide between three AI ecosystems. WordPress’s answer is that you don’t have to choose. Connect them all. Switch when a better one comes along. Your clients’ websites won’t care.

Then there’s MCP — the Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets AI agents connect to and interact with a WordPress site, including write access. The site doesn’t just sit there waiting to be updated. It participates. It can draft content, manage inventory, handle customer enquiries, automate lead sequences. All without anyone touching the dashboard.

My whole pitch — give clients autonomy over their own site — just got an upgrade. It’s not just autonomy for the client anymore. It’s autonomy for the business. The site runs itself.

So. What did I decide?

I’m staying on WordPress. Not out of loyalty. Out of two things. Cost and autonomy.

Cost, because the numbers don’t lie. The platforms that look cheaper upfront extract it from you on the way out. Every time. For growing businesses, WordPress wins the total cost of ownership argument by a significant margin.

Autonomy, because that’s still the core promise. Clients own their site. They can update it. They can take it somewhere else tomorrow if they want to. And now, with agentic AI baked into the WordPress core, that site can do things it could never do before — without the client needing a developer, or me, or anyone.

The AI builders are fast. WordPress is becoming intelligent. Those are different things serving different needs.

For a business that wants to get online quickly and never grow — fine, use Wix. But for a business that’s serious about growth, ownership, and not paying $6,000 to escape a platform they chose on a Tuesday afternoon — WordPress is still the answer.

That’s what I’m selling. That’s what I’m doing. And after all of this research, I’m more certain of it than I was before I started questioning.

If you’re a business owner trying to figure out your platform — or if you’re sitting on Wix and starting to feel the ceiling — let’s talk →

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

Written by a human. Affiliate links may apply. Nuffin’s for free.

“I’ve been quietly using Gamma with clients for months. I didn’t expect to like it this much — and I definitely didn’t expect it to make me look this good this fast.”

— Catie Hughes, LoudCow

PowerPoint hasn’t changed. Not really.

Sure, Microsoft slaps an “AI” badge on it every couple of years. But the process is the same as it was in 2003. Open a blank slide. Stare at it. Pick a template that looks sort of okay. Spend forty minutes moving text boxes around. Realise the font is wrong. Start over.

I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. So have most of my clients. And we’ve all quietly accepted that creating a decent-looking presentation is just… painful.

Then I started using Gamma.

I can’t show you the actual client proposals I’ve built in it — that’s not my story to tell. So instead, I built one from scratch for a completely fictional business. Right here. And I’m showing you everything.

The Setup: Gamma app presentation

Fictional client: a boutique interior design studio called Linen & Light. They’re pitching for a commercial fitout tender — a new co-working space in inner Melbourne. They need something polished, fast, and shareable without emailing a 40MB PowerPoint file that crashes on the recipient’s laptop.

Classic scenario. I’ve had this exact conversation a dozen times.

I opened Gamma. Typed this prompt:

“Create a pitch deck for Linen & Light, a boutique interior design studio based in Melbourne. We’re pitching for a commercial co-working space fitout tender. Audience is a property developer. We want to convey quality, calm, and attention to detail. Include: company intro, our approach, portfolio highlights, timeline, and investment.”

Hit generate.

What came back in under 60 seconds wasn’t a template. It was a structured, designed, presentation-ready deck. Sections exactly where I asked for them. Copy that sounded like a real brief, not a Lorem Ipsum placeholder. Visual hierarchy that actually made sense.

I spent maybe eight minutes tweaking. Changed one image. Adjusted a heading. Done.

Here’s the actual Linen & Light deck Gamma produced:

What Gamma actually solves

Here’s the thing about PowerPoint and Canva that nobody says out loud. They solve the wrong problem.

PowerPoint gives you infinite control over a blank canvas. Which sounds great until you realise most of us don’t need infinite control — we need a starting point that doesn’t look like it was made in 2009.

Canva is better, but it’s still a design tool. You’re still making decisions about layouts, colour palettes, spacing. You’re still doing the work.

Gamma solves the actual problem. The blank page.

You have an idea. You need it to look professional. You don’t have a designer on staff, you don’t have three hours, and you really don’t have the headspace to fiddle with kerning. Gamma takes the idea and handles the rest.

The features that actually matter

I’m not going to walk you through every menu item. Here’s what changed how I work.

Shareable link, not a file. No more “can you resend that in PDF” emails. You send a link. They click it. It works on every device, in every browser, without any software. Gamma also gives you analytics — you can see who opened it and how far they got. That’s genuinely useful when you’re following up with a prospect.

AI rewrites on demand. Highlight any section and ask Gamma to rewrite it — shorter, more formal, more casual, in a different language. It’s like having a copywriter on standby who isn’t precious about their work.

Embeddable anywhere. Proposals, reports, training documents — all can be embedded directly into a webpage or shared as a standalone microsite. For small businesses sending client deliverables, this is a significant upgrade from a PDF attachment.

Consistent branding, automatically. Upload your logo and brand colours once. Gamma applies them across the deck without you manually updating every slide. This alone saves embarrassing inconsistencies.

Who this is actually for

Gamma’s own positioning is broad — and honestly, fair. But here’s where I see it clicking.

Consultants and freelancers who send proposals regularly. If you’re still building proposals in Word, you’re leaving an impression on the table. A Gamma deck with your branding, sent as a link, looks like you have a team behind you. You don’t need one.

Small business owners who pitch for work. Tenders, capability statements, service overviews. The kind of documents that used to cost $500+ to get a designer to make look decent — now you’re doing it in twenty minutes.

Anyone who’s ever said “I’m not a designer.” That’s the point. You don’t have to be.

What it can’t do

Honest take. If you need pixel-perfect custom design — a brand launch deck for a listed company, something your creative director is going to obsess over — Gamma isn’t that. The AI makes smart choices, but they’re still AI choices. The more opinionated your design requirements, the more time you’ll spend overriding it.

Also: the free plan is genuinely limited. The AI credits run out fast if you’re iterating a lot. The Plus plan ($10/month) is the real entry point for regular use.

But for the 80% of presentation and document needs that most small businesses actually have? Gamma handles it.

The result

The Linen & Light deck took eleven minutes from blank screen to share link. It looked like a studio had made it. It had a consistent colour palette, proper hierarchy, a timeline slide that I didn’t have to build from scratch, and a cover page that I’d actually be proud to send.

The fake client would have hired us.

If you’re still battling PowerPoint, or spending your Sunday nights making Canva slides look less like a school project, give Gamma a go. There’s a free plan to start. You’ll know within ten minutes whether it’s your thing.

It was mine.

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

Heads up — some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Nuffin’s for free, right? This post was written by me, a human, after actual research and real tool-testing. AI helps me with the grunt work. The opinions are still mine.

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

Affiliate links may apply. I only recommend tools I’ve actually bought and tested. If you buy through my link, I earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

Affiliate links may apply. I only recommend tools I’ve actually bought and tested. If you buy through my link, I earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

Affiliate links may apply. I only recommend tools I’ve actually bought and tested. If you buy through my link, I earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.

Every few months someone asks me what tools I actually use. Not what I recommend to clients. Not what’s on my resources page. What’s open on my screen on a Tuesday afternoon when I’m trying to get something done.

This is that list. It’s shorter than you’d expect.

Google Workspace — the backbone I stopped noticing

I’ve been on Google Workspace since before it was called Google Workspace. Gmail, Drive, Meet, Calendar, Docs — it’s so embedded in how I work that I genuinely forget it’s a product I pay for.

I’ve fiddled with a lot of LLMs and productivity ecosystems this year. Claude, OpenAI, a few others. And every time I’ve come back to the same realisation — I’m a Google native. My files live in Drive. My meetings are in Meet. My inbox is Gmail. Spreading myself across multiple ecosystems was making me slower, not smarter.

So I’m settled now. Google Workspace is the foundation everything else sits on. Custom email on my domain. 30GB+ storage per user. Shared calendars that actually sync. And it plays nicely with every other tool in this list.

Starts at AU $8.40/user/month. 14-day free trial via my referral link — message me after you sign up and I’ll sort you an exclusive discount.

Base44 — the one that changed everything

I use Base44 every day. It’s where I build apps, run automations, and host the AI agents I install for clients. It’s also where this entire content operation lives — scheduling, publishing, research, the lot.

Before Base44, I was stitching together five different tools to do what one now does. Zapier for automations. Notion for briefs. A separate CRM. A separate database. It was a mess held together with goodwill and copy-pasted API keys.

Now it’s one place. Backend, frontend, automations, file storage, OAuth connectors. All of it.

It’s not cheap. It’s also not optional for how I work now.

Gamma — proposals that already looked good, now with a web link

I’ve been designing proposals in Adobe InDesign for years. They looked great. Clients liked them. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the delivery. A PDF lands in an inbox, gets downloaded, sits in a folder, maybe gets opened, maybe doesn’t. You have no idea. And on mobile it’s a disaster.

Gamma slotted into the end of that process rather than replacing it. I still start in InDesign — the words, the structure, the design thinking. Then I feed that into Gamma and get a clean web link out the other side. A proper landing page the client can open on any device, no download required.

They also get a PDF if they need it. But most clients prefer the link.

The open tracking is quietly useful too. You can see who looked at it and how far they got — which tells you a lot about whether a follow-up call is worth making.

Descript — screen recording without the faff

I make a lot of screen recordings. Client handovers. Walkthroughs. The occasional piece of tutorial content.

I used Loom for years. Then Loom started hiding features behind higher tiers in ways that felt petty, and I started looking around.

Descript edits video by editing the transcript. Delete a word from the text, it’s gone from the video. It sounds like a gimmick until you use it and realise you’ve been doing it the hard way your whole career.

It’s not the simplest tool on this list. There’s a real learning curve. But the time it saves on editing is not small, and the voiceover tools are genuinely good if you’re producing any kind of audio content.

AdCreative.ai — ad creative without the back-and-forth

I’m a copywriter. I have opinions about creative. Most AI ad tools produce output that looks like it was made by someone who has heard of marketing but never actually done any.

AdCreative.ai is different — not because it’s perfect, but because it’s a genuinely useful starting point. It generates on-brand static creative using your actual colours and logo. The output needs editing. But it’s faster to edit something that’s 70% there than to start from a blank canvas every time.

I use it for client campaign creative and for testing ad concepts before committing to a full production run.

AppSumo — where I buy things at prices that make sense

Most SaaS is priced for enterprises with procurement departments. AppSumo is not that.

I’ve bought lifetime deals on tools I use daily for what most platforms charge per month. The vetting is solid — they don’t list everything, and refunds are fast when something doesn’t work out.

It’s where I source things I’m curious about before committing to a full subscription. Low risk to try, easy to exit.

What didn’t make the list

A lot of things. I’ve refunded more tools than I’ve kept. The graveyard includes. three different project management apps, two AI writing tools that wrote like robots trying to pass as humans, a scheduling platform that looked great in the demo and broke on day one, and roughly a hundred AppSumo purchases that solved problems I didn’t actually have.

The test I use now. is this open on my screen next Tuesday? If the answer is probably not, I don’t buy it.

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

Affiliate links may apply. I only recommend tools I’ve actually bought and tested. If you buy through my link, I earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

Affiliate links may apply. I only recommend tools I’ve actually bought and tested. If you buy through my link, I earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.