I Spent 20000 On Ai Tools Heres What Actually Works

TITLE: I Spent $20,000 on AI Tools, Here’s What Actually Works CHANNEL: Oliur Online DATE: 2026-04-24 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I feel like there’s just a ridiculous amount of AI tools out there right now. And it’s actually quite difficult to work out which ones are worth your time and money. For me especially, like I value my own time. I don’t want to be messing around with all sorts of AI tools and just finding out that they’re rubbish. But unfortunately, I have used quite a few tools. And in this video, I wanted to list some of the tools that I’m actually using, some of the tools that my team is using, some of the tools that other people are using that are actually useful and worth paying for. Some of these aren’t also fully AI, but they do also sort of complement AI. Now, of course, Claude is the big one. Claude is the one that I’ve been covering a lot on the channel. I feel like a lot of people have been using because I think Claude is very well designed for productivity focused stuff. So, if you’re someone who needs to do research, if you’re someone who needs to work with files on your computer, if you’re someone who wants to code, Claude, I feel like they’ve done such a good job of housing everything all in one, especially when you look at their app. So having the app and having the chat functionality, the co-work functionality, and the coding functionality all in one place just makes it super easy to use all of the tools without having to constantly change windows and sort of change context or whatever. And I find myself switching between all three very quickly and easily because it’s in one app. It just makes my life a lot easier. Their chat functionality is like any other sort of chat AI tool which you can use to do research, find answers, sort of come up with strategies and stuff. I use it a lot for just day-to-day things. When I need to do some research or I need to be educated on something or I’m trying to find out about something, I use Claw to do all that sort of stuff. I of course change between the languages quite often as well because you don’t want to be using their most powerful model all the time. However, I do pay for the max plan which is $200 a month, which I think is worth it. Like I think the sort of capabilities and stuff you get with it are insane. Because of that, I do actually tend to use OPUS more than I probably should, but I’ve never hit the limits, so I’m not really complaining. Their co-work feature in particular, I think, is super powerful because co-work, as the name suggests, it’s kind of imagine it like an AI agent doing work for you in the background. And it can do stuff on your computer. So, if you give it access to a folder on your computer, you can have it do stuff within that folder. So, I’ve shown examples in the past where if you have sort of financial statements or something in a folder, you need to get information from those financial statements. You can do that with co-work. You can also have it sort of compare legal documents or whatever. Have it compare information. And they have a lot of other ideas here. So, you can have it do all these different things here. Organize my files. I think that’s a good one. So, let’s just say you have a folder which has a bunch of different files like your downloads folder and you wanted to organize all those files for you can do that. You can have it organize images, videos, or have it do a specific thing. Maybe you’re looking for files with a specific file name and to put them all in a folder. You can have it do that sort of thing. You can have it write stuff for you, create a landing page, build a dashboard. Those are actually very similar to Claude code as well. You can have it analyze Google Drive documents because it doesn’t just have to work on your computer. If you have it connected with the connectors functionality, and they have a bunch of connectors here, you can have it get information from those places. So, it doesn’t necessarily just have to be on your computer. I think this is another good example of say you have information in a service like Linear or Figma or whatever. It could be Google Drive, but you want that information on your computer. You want it as a PDF, you want it as a CSV or something like that. You can have it do this for you without you having to do it manually. And then they also have clawed code which I’ve done a video on which I would highly recommend just showing how to use claw code in the app to make stuff to make a website or whatever. The app version is good. It’s great. I think it’s great for doing sort of more basic things um like building a website building an app. Maybe if you’re not working on multiple projects at the same time, even though you can have multiple projects at the same time going, I think if you’re starting out, this is what I’d recommend. If you’re someone who’s not really a developer, who’s not messed around with code and stuff in the past, but wants to build things, this is what I’d recommend checking out and using. OpenAI have their own version of Claude Code, which they call Codeex, and Codeex, I’d say, is just as good as Claude Code. But it does depend because some people say that one is better than the other. I personally haven’t seen too much of a difference. What I end up doing is if there’s something I can’t do in Clawed Code or Claude Code is struggling, then I switch to Codeex. And then if Codeex is struggling, I switch to Claw Code. So, I switch between the two models. I am not tied to any of these things. If a better model came out tomorrow, if a better app came out tomorrow, I would completely switch. I don’t care about any of these companies or brands. I want to use whatever works for me, whatever I think is best. Codeex do have their own app as well, which I really like. I actually think they’ve done a really good job with this app because you can use it for multi- sort of agent coding. So, you can have a bunch of different things going in here and work on different projects all at the same time. And I actually think the app is really welld designed. Is it better designed than clawed code? Um, I think it depends on what you’re looking for. I think that’s the great thing about all of these apps and what they can do. Um, it really depends on what you’re looking for. What I do like about Codeex is that you can connect it to your GitHub, you can connect it to an IDE, you can see your lines of code, what changes and stuff have been made. Um, you have the normal chat box like you would, and then you can see your projects on the lefth hand side. And again, you can work on multiple projects at the same time. So when one agent is working in the background on one project, you can then work on another project or another branch with codeex and have multiple agents working at the same time coding stuff in the background. I do like the app. I think they’ve done a really good job with it and I think they’ve done a good job of catching up to Clawed Code because when Claude Code came out, it was super popular. I feel like it blew up. Everyone was raving on about it. So it’s good to see Chip now have Codeex, which I think is just as good. The app that I’ve been using though to code stuff and to make stuff and to build stuff is an app called Conductor. And what I really like about Conductor is the way it looks, the way it feels, and the way it works. The sort of UX of this and the UI design of this, I think, is awesome. On the left, you have all of your projects and repos. In the middle, you have your chat box and stuff. And you can see your branches at the top as well. And on the right, you can see your files, you can see the changes, and you can see your terminal. Everything all in this one place. It’s like opening up a dashboard and just working on all your projects. I absolutely love this thing. And the reason why I love this thing is that I can actually switch between the models. So, I have both Codeex and Claude Code hooked up in here. I pay for both of those subscriptions and I can switch between the two languages whenever I like. This is what makes Conductor for me really powerful, being able to switch between the two models. And you can even change the sort of thinking levels. You can enter plan mode and stuff. You can enable fast mode. There’s so much you can do in here. Uh, I really do like how it works and looks. I think this is a natural graduation away from using Claude Code app and the codeex app. I’m also not a big fan of using claude code in the terminal itself. Mainly because I just feel like the terminal for me, especially coming from a design background, just seems too sort of robotic and not as useful as something like this where I can see everything all at once and I don’t necessarily have to be logging into a terminal. What I also like about this is that I can drag and drop images and see what images I’ve put in. So if I need to take a screenshot or something with the terminal, you can actually see what you’ve dropped in. You’ve got to hope that you dropped in the right file, which usually like unless you’re an idiot, you’re not going to. But with this, I can see the files that I’ve dropped in. I can have commands in here as well and see all the commands that I have available to me. Yeah, I really like Conductor. It’s my main way of building stuff. And it’s free. The app itself is free. Of course, you have to pay through the Chanty PT subscription and claw subscription, but the app itself is free. So, I feel like you don’t really lose anything other than your own time trying it out. I also wanted to quickly mention Victor, who are sponsoring this video. One thing I’ve noticed running a creative business like this is that a huge chunk of my week doesn’t actually go into doing work. It goes into doing the admin stuff around the work, pulling reports, chasing things across tools, summarizing threads, keeping track of what’s happening next. That sort of stuff really adds up fast. Victor is a tool that is built specifically for that layer. It is an AI co-worker that lives in Slack or Microsoft Teams and handles multi-step tasks across my tools without me actually having to manage it manually. It’s not just a chat tool that you open when you have a question. It’s something that can actually work in the background and get things done before you even have to ask. For anyone running a oneperson business or a small team, this is definitely worth checking out. I’ll leave a link to it down in the description below. Hostinger. So, this isn’t necessarily an AI tool. However, you’re going to need hosting for apps, for stuff that you build in code. And I found Hostinger for me just makes the most sense. Mainly because they have a lot of stuff that just makes the whole process a lot easier. So, when you go to their services, you can see all the services they have available. And the services I’ve been using most are VPS hosting and Node.js apps. But what also makes hosting it so powerful and why I love using it is that you can do things like one-click installs. So, when you get a VPS host and you get it all set up, you can just quickly install services and apps. for example, things like NA10, which I’ll cover actually in a bit. But you can also install Open Claw. So, if you’re someone who’s been interested in trying out OpenC or whatever, and you don’t want to get a Mac Mini or other machine to work it to sort of figure it on, you can try using it here. I’ve been using Hostinger to host pretty much most of the apps that I’ve been building in claw code and codecs and stuff just because it’s super easy. It can pull it from my GitHub, no problem, and start deploying apps. And the other reason I like Hostinger is that they don’t charge you ridiculous amounts of money when you go over usage like other services do. I’m not going to name what those services are, but with Hostinger for example, if we look at their NodeJS apps hosting, we’ll look at their plans, what plans they have available. They have two plans here. They have the business one and the cloud startup one. These plans, the 399799, that’s all you will pay. So if you go over, they’re not going to overcharge you. other services which when you go over their usage, you can sometimes end up with a bill that’s like 10, 20, 30, $40,000. I’ve seen someone post a bill on Twitter on X showing their bill of $40,000 and they’re like, I can’t afford this. No one wants to end up in that position. With Hostinger, they have limits, so you won’t go over. And if you do go over, then they’ll notify you and you can upgrade your account. I’ve been particularly using Hostinger, like I said, for the VPS and the Node.js apps. and I’ve been using it to host instances of N810 and plausible analytics and there’s just so much other stuff you can do with it. I really do think for hosting stuff, affordable hosting, they’re definitely one of the best. That leads us quite well into N8N. So N8N again isn’t necessarily a sort of like AI tool, but it uses AI to essentially automate anything and everything you can think of. It is ridiculously powerful. It’s like Zapia or Make.com, but what makes NAM are what I love about it is that you can self-host it. Services like Zapia and Make.com, they are great, but they can add up in pricing, especially if you have a lot of stuff going on. So, I installed NSN on my Hostinger account, and I’ve been using it to basically consolidate things. So, for example, I get a lot of emails and customers from one place, but I want to move them to another place. Having to do that manually is so tedious. like I don’t want to be doing that every day, every month, every week, whatever it might be. I can have N10 automate that whole thing and I move thousands of emails every month, thousands of pieces of customer data and I need to be able to move it to different places so that I can have different services access it. That’s what NAN does for me. But not only that, they can do a bunch of other stuff. They have lots of examples on their website. They have like it ops, secops, devops, sales. Um when you go to their use cases, is it product or use? No, templates. Let’s go to the templates. This is a great place to see what you can do with NA10 and they have lots of templates available. So if you’re someone who’s trying to figure out, h what can I have my NA10 instance do for me. There are so many different things here. You can have it connected to pretty much any service you have. So they have one here, receipt scanning and analysis workflow. I think this is genius. So it automatically detects when a new receipt is uploaded to Google Drive. It extracts the text and then uses an AI agent to analyze the extracted data and structure it like the vendor, the date, the total and the tax. And then it saves the organized receipt data into Google sheet for easy tracking. That is super powerful. So if you need to do receipt tracking maybe for your business or maybe for the company you work for where you have expenses and stuff, this is going to make life a lot easier. I feel like you could even take this a step further, right? You could maybe connect it to something like Slack or WhatsApp or Telegram or something like that and you just take a picture of your receipt and you just upload it there and then let N do the rest of the configuration. You don’t have to do anything. Those are the sorts of things that NA10 is super powerful for. A lot of the tedious stuff that you don’t really want to be spending time doing. It can do all of those things for you. And the great thing is you can have it set up either to do it instantly, like for example, when I have emails coming, I want it to move the emails instantly, or you can have it scheduled. So maybe you wanted to do it once a day, once a week, once a month, whatever it might be. I think N810 is awesome and I feel like the capabilities that it has are insane. I’m not using it anywhere near towards this limit. And I feel like I almost feel like I need to figure out more things to do with it. Retune.dev. So this is like adding Figma or Framer on top of your claw code or your codeex projects. So the idea here is that you install it on your project with the um mpm installed that they have here and then you can make visual changes to your site and actually see them live before you commit them to the AI agent. Absolute lifesaver, especially for someone like me who really cares about the UI design of things. Most of these AI agents just make UIs that I feel like work. They look good, but they don’t necessarily look unique. They sort of all look the same. So, I like to spend time adjusting the UI, making it look the way I want and having my style and my branding. Retune Dev really helps me do that because you can see here in the demo video, you can do things like adjust the padding, adjust the button radius, the sizes of fonts, whatever it might be, and see them live. Like, I want to be able to see the changes live and make those little tweaks, make those little adjustments. And then when I’m happy with them, it gives me uh this the output. I paste it into into claude or into codeex and it will do the job for me. This also helps actually save on uh sort of tokens. So instead of making each individual change manually if you make a ton of changes all at once and then you get the output from the agent and then paste it in, you’re going to save a lot of tokens because then it doesn’t have to go through all the other chats before all the other messages before and get the context because you’ve put everything all in one. If you’re a UI UX designer and you really care about the way your websites look, your apps look, I would highly recommend checking this out. 11 Labs. So, I’m sure most people have heard of 11 Labs and what it can do. But every time my team uses it, because I don’t actually use it that much myself, but my team do. My team use it a lot. Every time they use it and they come to me with a result, I’m like, how is that even possible? 11 Labs is awesome. I won’t go into too much detail, but their voice stuff, it just blows my mind because you can even feed it your own voice. So, for example, if I wanted to feed it my voice and learn my voice and say I wanted to make a whole video with my voice, I could technically do that. I can just put in the whole script of a video what I wanted to say, put it in here, and it will do it in my voice. So, and it will sound like me. Is it going to sound exactly like me? Not necessarily, because humans generally have sort of weird quirks when they talk. I’m sure I have weird quirks when I talk that I don’t even know. the way I say certain words, the way I pronounce certain things, the way I end sentences, the way I end words, the emotion behind the way I talk, all of these sorts of things AI can’t exactly sort of replicate, but it is getting better. And what I found it useful for is say I need to make a change in a video which I’ve already recorded with my real voice, but I need to make a change to a bit of the video where I don’t have time to sort of set up a camera or whatever and and I’m away from my setup. I’m away from a mic, but I need to make this change. I can just put it in here and then have it read out that line and then insert it. And I’ve done that and not a single person has noticed. I have never gotten a comment on a video of someone saying, “Hey, that doesn’t sound right.” Because they can’t tell the difference. When it comes to sort of quick changes like that, sort of just oneliners or a few words. This is perfect for that. Their website has so many different tools. And I think if you’re a business owner, it’s definitely worth checking out 11 Labs. Next up is MidJourney. And Midjourney is an image generator. It can also generate videos, these sort of short videos that you see here. and midjourney. I feel like when I see stuff like this, I kind of think to myself, ah, you know, none of this really looks that appealing. Maybe this video here actually looks quite good. Um, well, I feel like the robot video looks quite cool. Robot picture looks quite cool. Um, mid Journey is super powerful and it’s getting more and more powerful over the years, but what I’ve been using it for is to generate some wallpaper packs. So, one of my most popular wallpaper packs, if I go to my website, is the acrylic paint wallpaper pack. This wallpaper pack was completely made with MidJourney. I didn’t actually find the paint or sort of make these canvases or anything like that. This whole wallpaper pack with all of these images that you see here are made in Midjourney. And this wallpaper pack has made me tens of thousands of dollars all because of MidJourney, which is just crazy to me. Here I have turned something into a product, images into a product, sold it on my website, and it’s made me tens of thousands of dollars. So, MidJourney and these sorts of AI image generation tools can be so powerful when it comes to making stuff, doing mockups, doing images for products, um sort of having to put a product on someone or whatever. There’s just so many possibilities and some of the stuff that some people produce blows my mind. Jamie here is someone that I follow on Twitter and she does an incredible job of showing what MidJourney can do. So, for example, here’s something that she produced with AI. And these are images that are AI, but they look real. Like the aesthetic, the look of them. You I feel like if you were to put these on a website or to upload these to Instagram, I don’t think most people will be able to tell that this is AI. And this is what she’s good at. If you spend the time learning mid journey, learning prompts, learning from what other people have made, you can create some awesome stuff with it. So, those are just some of the AI tools that I’ve been using recently that I actually think are useful, that I actually think are worth paying for. I’m sure there are so many others out there. I’m sure at some point I’ll make another video covering some other AI tools. Make sure to check out these other videos I’ve done on AI related stuff as well, Claude Code and stuff. I feel like those videos people really love. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe for more.