The five paid AI tools I run my e-commerce businesses on. What each one does, how I use it, and the cheaper tier to start on.
I’ve cancelled most AI tools inside a month. These five stayed. I pay for heavy tiers on a couple because I’m in them all day. You shouldn’t start there. Start on the cheapest tier and move up only when you keep hitting its limits.
The Rule I Use
A subscription stays if I can name what it replaced. What would I do by hand if I cancelled it tomorrow? No one-sentence answer, it goes.
Prices from each pricing page on November 1, 2026. They move, so check before you buy.
01
The hub I run my businesses on
If I could keep one tool, it’s this one. I run my businesses out of Claude Code. One agent audits my email program and rewrites the weakest flows in my brand voice. Skills run a job the same way every time. Subagents check each other’s work, because the agent that wrote something is the worst one to review it. It all sits on a folder of plain files, including rules Claude wrote for itself each time I corrected it.
Start in the chat app. Build a Project with your role, goals and the documents you keep re-explaining. Connect your email, drive and calendar. Tell it your standards once (push back when I’m wrong, no jargon). Move to Claude Code when you want work happening without you.
Price And Honest Limit
Free plan available. Pro is $20/mo ($17 billed yearly) and includes Claude Code. Max is $100/mo for 5x Pro’s usage, and the new Ultra is $200/mo for 10x. I’m on Max because I kept hitting limits mid-task. If you aren’t, you don’t need it. (Claude pricing)
02
Codex, images and Sites
I pay for both on purpose. I spend most of my ChatGPT time in Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. When something matters, one model builds it and the other tears it apart. A model is bad at catching the mistake it just made.
ChatGPT images handle my product mockups, ad creative and slide visuals in minutes instead of days with a designer. Sites, inside Codex, builds and hosts a simple site or app from a description. Great for trackers, dashboards and landing pages.
Try this: send your finished work to the other model and ask what’s wrong with it. Don’t buy both on day one. Run one for a month and see where it lets you down.
Price And Honest Limit
Free, a cheaper Go plan, and Plus at $20/mo, where most people should land. Pro comes in $100 and $200 tiers with much more Codex usage. Codex is on every plan now, even Free. Sites is in beta and isn’t on Free or Go. For most people, one paid plan plus one free account is plenty. (ChatGPT pricing) How I switch between models.
03
I stopped typing to my AI
Voice to text that cleans itself up as you talk. It drops your filler words and fixes the grammar. You think faster than you type, so typing makes you shorten what you meant. Less context, worse answer.
My favorite use: open Claude, hit record and ramble for two minutes about who you are and how you work. Then say turn this into a clean markdown file I can reuse. That’s your context file, done. It works in email and Slack too.
Price And Honest Limit
Start on the free plan. Pro is $15/mo, or $12/mo billed yearly. Free gives you a weekly word allowance (on desktop the warnings start at 2,000 words), which goes fast. It can read context from the app you’re dictating into, so check its privacy settings first. (Wispr Flow pricing)
04
I feed my AI what nobody else’s AI can see
When Claude or ChatGPT needs something new, it searches the web and reads the top results. Everyone asking the same question gets an answer built from the same public pages. Apify pulls in what search misses. I use it to transcribe the podcasts I listen to, scrape threads from people I trust and save my newsletters. All of it goes into a knowledge file Claude reads.
It also does reviews. Apify’s MCP server connects to Claude, so Claude can scrape every review my brand has and pull out what customers complain about and the words they use. That goes straight into product decisions and ad copy.
Start here: scrape the reviews of the top three products in your category. Every complaint is a product idea, and every repeated phrase is ad copy.
Price And Honest Limit
Free gives you $5 of usage a month, no card required. Starter is $19/mo. It’s the most technical tool here, and the bill moves with how much you run. (Apify pricing)
05
The place the work actually lives
Remember that great strategy chat from three weeks ago you can’t find? Notion is where my AI output lands instead. One page per project, every output dropped in. Notion AI answers questions across all of it ("what did we decide about pricing?"), and it connects to Claude so Claude can read it too.
Price And Honest Limit
No cheap way to get full Notion AI. Free and Plus only get a limited trial. The full AI comes with Business, listed at $20 per member a month. If budget is tight, skip this one first. (Notion pricing)
Wispr Flow gets the context in. Apify adds what public search can’t see. Claude does the thinking and building. ChatGPT builds, makes images and checks Claude’s work. Notion keeps it all.
If You Only Do One Thing
Start with Claude Pro at $20 and the free tier of Wispr Flow. Add the others only when you feel the problem each one solves.
Already paying for a pile of tools? Paste them into this prompt and let it tell you what to cut.