Section
Apps, AI tools and platforms tested on real workloads.
I ran three months of client emails, two long reports and a 40,000-word manuscript through Grammarly Premium. It saved me from real embarrassment twice — and tried to flatten my voice about a hundred times.
Surfer's content score is the most addictive number in SEO. After three months and 22 published articles, I can tell you exactly when chasing it helps and when it quietly ruins your writing.
Two tax years, one small limited company and far too many receipts later — here is where QuickBooks Online earns its price, and where the upsells start to grate.
A year of daily use across a Mac, an iPhone, a Windows laptop and a small team. 1Password is expensive for a thing that stores strings — and I would still pay it again.
We moved a six-person team onto ClickUp for eight weeks. It replaced four tools and created one new problem: deciding how to use it.
Colourful, opinionated and slightly expensive. We tested Monday.com with a marketing team that had abandoned three tools before it — and this one stuck.
I built and launched two sites on Wix — a restaurant page and a small store — and pushed both until something broke. Something did.
Thirty short videos, one long one, and a genuine attempt to break it. CapCut is astonishingly good for free — and the paid upsells are getting pushier.
Jasper costs several times what a general AI subscription does. I spent a month producing real marketing copy in both to find out what the premium buys.
Six months, one company wiki, three abandoned dashboards and a database habit I had to break. An honest look at what Notion is genuinely good at.
Three months of research, editing and code review. Claude is not the flashiest AI subscription — it is the one that reads a 90-page PDF and tells you something true about it.
Asana is the least flashy of the big three project tools and the most disciplined. After a six-week rollout, that turned out to be the point.
We ran a small store on Shopify for a full season, including a launch spike. Here is what the platform handles for you — and what the app bill really looks like.
Copilot writes a surprising share of my boilerplate and a worrying share of my bugs. A year of daily use, measured honestly.
If you want a beautiful site by Friday and never want to think about plugins, Squarespace has an obvious case. Here is where the constraints start to hurt.
We built the same full-stack app twice — once in Lovable, once in Bolt — tracking prompts, errors, deploy time and monthly cost. One of them got us to a live, database-backed product without touching a terminal.
We rebuilt three business processes in Airtable — a content pipeline, a supplier list and a recruitment tracker. Two were transformative. One should have stayed a spreadsheet.
The full version of a Hollywood colour suite costs nothing. The catch is not the price — it is the first fortnight.
We ran a real list of 4,200 subscribers through Mailchimp for four months. Deliverability held. The invoice climbed.
Figma won by being in the browser and letting non-designers watch. After a year of product work, here is where it is brilliant and where it still frustrates.
Descript turns your footage into a transcript and lets you edit the transcript. For interviews and podcasts, it is the biggest time saver I have tested in years.
I moved off VS Code for a month. Cursor's codebase awareness is the real thing — and it changed which parts of my job I enjoy.
Call quality on bad Wi-Fi, AI summaries that actually get used, and a pricing page with more corners than it needs. Three months of daily meetings.
We replaced roughly a third of our recurring meetings with recorded videos for two months. Here is what worked and what people quietly ignored.
We built 23 automations across a small business stack. Zapier connected everything in an afternoon and then charged us for every task it ran.
A small sales team ran on HubSpot's free CRM for three months. It is genuinely capable — right up to the moment you need one paid feature.
Six accounts, a terabyte each, and a suite most people use 10% of. Whether Microsoft 365 is worth it depends on one question: do you need real Excel?
Four hundred generations across product mockups, editorial art and one very stubborn brand illustration. Midjourney's quality lead is real — so is its workflow tax.
Two months using Perplexity instead of Google for research questions. The citations change how much you can trust the answer — and how fast you can check it.
We generated two hours of narration for real projects. The quality is remarkable, the ethical guardrails matter, and the credit system needs watching.
A year of real marketing output — social posts, decks, one-pagers, a printed banner. Canva Pro is remarkable value and there is still a line it cannot cross.
