The Tools I Actually Use to Run Four Businesses (2026)

TL;DR: This is my real stack. Every tool on this page is something I pay for, build on, or trust with client work across my consulting business and three products. Full write-ups, honest limitations, real prices. And at the bottom, the graveyard: everything I quit, with causes of death.

Last updated: July 2026. I update this when my stack changes, not on a schedule.

About the links: Some links on this page pay me a commission if you sign up. Every one of them is marked "(affiliate link)". The rest carry a plain ref tag so companies know who sent you, which pays me nothing. I used every tool here before any of them paid me, and the graveyard at the bottom shows how fast I drop tools that stop earning their spot. If a commission ever changes what I recommend, call me on it.

Jump to: The AI stack · Running the business · The money stack · Building and shipping · The desk · Home base · Tools I quit · FAQ

The AI stack

I run four businesses with a headcount of one. Agents fill the gap. Here's what that actually looks like, beyond the LinkedIn hype. If you want the longer version of how I think about agent platforms, I wrote about the three lanes of agentic AI.

Claude Code

My daily driver, and honestly the tool this whole page orbits around. Claude Code writes and ships production code with me on client platforms, runs my weekly business audits, files my meeting action items, and rebuilt the very page you're reading. I still use Warp and the Claude Code CLI/TUI, and I still spin up cloud sessions when the work wants parallel tracks. But I'm trying to do more in the Claude desktop app now because the UX is improving, the GitHub integration is getting tighter, and being able to close the app without losing a session is more valuable than it sounds. You can solve some of that with tmux and terminal discipline. I'd rather stay native when I can. The unlock isn't code completion. It's that I can hand it an outcome ("battle test the client portal before my demo in 8 minutes") and it goes and does the thing. The honest limitation: it's only as good as the context you maintain for it. I keep a whole knowledge base of project state so sessions don't start from zero, and that upkeep is real work. I pay $200/month for my personal Claude plan. Hermes runs on its own separate $20/month Claude account, plus its own OpenAI Codex account. Some months I go over on usage, especially during big pushes like the one right around July 4th, and it's been worth it every time for getting a major project over the finish line. No affiliate program. It gets the top slot anyway.

Hermes (Eddy)

Eddy is my AI chief of staff. He's a Hermes agent living on a DigitalOcean setup that recent receipts put around $35 to $36/month, and he works while I sleep. Every morning at 5:30 he builds my brief: calendar, inbox triage, my live P\&L from Xero, overdue invoices, and yesterday's call follow-through. Every evening he sweeps my meeting notes and files the action items where they belong. When I leave comments on a draft, he picks them up within 30 minutes and responds with suggested edits. I used to run him on OpenClaw. I migrated in May 2026, and the move cost me a weekend. The limitation is trust calibration: an agent that can touch your email, your accounting, and your task systems needs guardrails, and building those took longer than the install. No affiliate program.

The rest of the AI bench

Codex. OpenAI's coding agent. I run it alongside Claude Code, usually for isolated implementation work while Claude handles architecture and review. Two agents, one repo, fewer arguments than you'd expect. No affiliate program.

Zernio. The social scheduling API my agents post through. My LinkedIn posts get scheduled by an agent, and the stats flow back into my notes without me touching a dashboard. Formerly called Late. It's an API-first tool, so if you want a pretty calendar UI, this isn't it.

Wispr Flow. Voice-to-text that keeps up with my brain, and honestly the thing that changed how I work with AI day to day. I have ADHD and think about 5x faster than I type, so half of what I "write" starts as me pacing around the office talking, whether that's a paragraph for this page or a string of instructions to an agent. It's what lets me actually multitask across different clients and projects: dictate context to one project's agent, switch to another client's, come back, and never lose the thread typing would have cost me. It occasionally mangles product names, which is a small price for $15/month.

Running the business

The boring stack is boring because it works. If the AI section is where the excitement lives, this section is where the revenue does.

Basecamp + Linear (yes, both)

Client work lives in Basecamp. Basecamp actually runs my whole GTD workflow, not just client work: day-to-day next actions live there alongside the client-facing card tables and docs for my consulting engagements. Linear is narrower. Right now it only holds technical todos for the fully hands-off AI agent projects I'm building, nothing else. I tried collapsing everything into one tool and it made both jobs worse: clients don't want a kanban education, and I don't want my own GTD system visible in a shared space. 37signals' whole philosophy of calm software matches how I want clients to experience working with me. My agents file into both automatically after every call. The cost of the split is checking two inboxes, and I pay it happily. Asana lost to Linear years ago and never got a rematch. No affiliate program for either.

Superhuman

My email client. Gmail underneath, Superhuman on top. I went through Missive and Hey.com to get here and stopped looking after Superhuman stuck. The speed is the point: morning triage takes about a third of the time it used to, and the keyboard-everything workflow means I never touch the mouse. It's expensive for an email client at $30/month, and if your inbox isn't a core work surface, it's probably not worth it. Mine is. No affiliate program, just a good tool.

Cal.com

Every client call I book runs through Cal.com. It's open source, the booking page loads fast, and routing does what the pricing page says it does. I left Calendly because I got tired of paying more every year for a product that got busier every year, and I wrote about why open source matters more in the AI era. I run separate booking links for clients, podcasts, and VIPs. The app store is hit or miss, and a couple of integrations needed workarounds. I run the free, self-hosted open-source version. Try Cal.com here (affiliate link, marked because I'd recommend it for free).

Granola

AI meeting notes that actually get used afterward. Granola sits in the menu bar, transcribes every call, and produces notes good enough that I've stopped taking my own. I have about 1,100 meetings captured, and my agents mine them nightly: action items get filed to Basecamp or Linear, promises I made on calls get surfaced in my morning brief before they become apologies. The limitation: it's Mac-first, and the folder organization gets messy once you pass a few hundred notes. Granola is here (affiliate link).

Obsidian

My second brain, and the memory layer for every agent I run. It's a folder of markdown files, which sounds primitive until you realize markdown is the bread and butter of AI. My agents read it, write to it, and keep it synced through Git. Ten years of notes apps taught me one thing: the exit door matters. Obsidian's exit door is "it's just files." The limitation is that the power comes from plugins and structure you have to build yourself. Out of the box it's an empty vault, literally. Free for personal use. No affiliate program, just a good tool.

The supporting cast

Slack + Telegram. Slack for client teams and my AI advisory council. Telegram is where Eddy sends my morning brief and where I voice-note ideas back to him from the truck.

Toggl. Pomodoro timers for focus blocks. The ADHD tax is real; Toggl is part of how I pay it.

Google Workspace. Email domains, calendar, drive. The plumbing.

The money stack

I run Profit First across four businesses, which makes the money stack the operating system, not back-office plumbing. I wrote up the full setup in how Profit First changed my financial life.

Relay

My primary business bank, and the only one I've found that's actually built for Profit First. I run five accounts per the book: Income, Owner's Comp, Taxes, Profit, and OpEx, and Relay makes the allocation transfers painless instead of a monthly chore. No minimums, no monthly fees, and sub-accounts that take thirty seconds to create. The limitation: it's online-only, so anything requiring a banker with a desk still routes through my legacy Chase account. Mercury is the alternative I'd name if Relay didn't exist. Relay is here (affiliate link).

Xero

My accounting system, and the thing my AI chief of staff reads every morning to tell me who owes me money. The API is good enough that my agents pull the live P\&L, track overdue invoices, and flag when my run rate drifts off the annual goal. I detest QuickBooks and everything Intuit makes, and I say that as someone who tried to like it. Xero's US payroll story is thinner than its home market, and the bank feed occasionally needs a nudge. Worth it anyway. $78/month. Xero is here (affiliate link).

The rest of the money stack

Stripe. Payment collection. My agent watches the event stream so a failed payment pings me before the client notices. No affiliate program.

Ramp. I run this on the client side: vendor payments, virtual cards per vendor, and a webhook feed into the client's books. If you have real AP volume, it's excellent. The onboarding questionnaire is not short.

Chase. The legacy account. Kept for the things that still want a "real" bank.

Building and shipping

What I build client platforms and my own products on. This section changed more in the last 18 months than the previous five years, mostly because AI ate the low-code layer. More on that in the graveyard.

Supabase

The data plane for everything I ship now: my biggest client platform runs on it end to end, and both of my product rebuilds landed on it. Postgres with auth, storage, edge functions, and row-level security in one box, plus an API my AI agents can drive directly. I've migrated a production system off Airtable onto Supabase and the difference shows up at scale: real queries, real constraints, no 1,000-row surprises. The honest limitation is that row-level security is powerful and easy to get subtly wrong. I've been burned once and now audit policies like it's a religion. Free tier is generous; I pay $50-75/month across projects. No affiliate program, just a good tool.

Hookdeck

The most load-bearing tool nobody's heard of. Every inbound webhook I care about goes through Hookdeck: it receives, queues, retries, and lets me replay anything that failed. It's in production on a client's payment-data sync, which means their books depend on it. Before Hookdeck, a dropped webhook meant reconciling by hand and hoping. Now I can inspect every delivery and replay last Tuesday if I have to. It's one more moving part in the stack, and the dashboard takes a day to make sense of. No affiliate program. I'd link it anyway.

Make.com

My automation platform for explicit, deterministic business workflows. I use it less and less as more of my AI/dev work moves into code and agents, but when a client needs a complex automation that should run the same way every time, Make is still the grown-up answer. The visual builder handles real branching logic without turning into spaghetti, the error handling shows exactly which step failed and lets you replay it, and I have been using it in one form or another for almost a decade. If you're technical and self-hosting appeals to you, n8n is the third door. Make is here (affiliate link).

Ghost

This site, my newsletter, and the reason you're reading this page on my domain instead of someone's platform. Ghost gives me full ownership: content, subscriber list, SEO, all of it. I push posts to it through its API from my notes, which means my publishing pipeline is plain markdown files. The editor's underlying format has quirks when you automate against it, and themes are a rabbit hole I mostly avoid. For most people who just want a beautiful site this is overkill, and I tell them so two questions down in the FAQ. $25/month on the Creator plan. No affiliate link yet; Ghost's program has an audience threshold I haven't hit. Honest page.

The rest of the shipping stack

Vercel. Where everything deploys. Client platform, product apps, landing pages. Push to a branch, get a preview URL, promote to prod. The bill can sneak up at scale, so watch the analytics add-ons.

DigitalOcean. The droplets my agents live on. Boring, predictable pricing, no AWS bill anxiety. DigitalOcean link (affiliate link).

Resend. Transactional email for my apps. Clean API, spam rates I don't think about. The dashboard is minimal to a fault.

Tailscale. The private network between my machines and servers. SSH with zero exposed ports. The only time it's ever failed me was the morning I forgot I'd turned it off. Free tier covers most solo setups. No affiliate program, just a good tool.

Airtable. Still the fastest way to give a business team a database they'll actually use, and I've built serious client systems on it. But I've also now migrated a production platform off it, so I recommend it with a boundary: brilliant under \~50k records and moderate automation, wrong tool past that. Credits-only referral program, so: plain link.

Fillout + Cognito Forms. I still like the split: Fillout for simple forms, Cognito for complex forms with logic and payments. I am not using them as much as I used to, but when a form needs to be boring and deterministic, they still do the job.

Carrd. This used to be my go-to for quick one-page sites because the UI is simple and it was super cheap. Now Claude can build me a landing page in code even faster, so I reach for Carrd less. Still fine if you want simple, cheap, and hosted for you.

What I tell other people to use: you probably noticed this stack assumes you like building. If you don't: Squarespace for your site (it's beautiful and it just works), Shopify if you're selling physical products (I ran a film gear ecommerce business on it in South Africa and it never blinked). I don't use either today. I still recommend both.

The desk

OBSBOT Tiny 2 (obsbot.com) is my webcam, and probably the one thing people notice most on calls. It's a gimbal, not a fixed lens, so I can run a call from my desk for the serious look or swivel across the office into the chair for something more casual, and it tracks and reframes either way. Two different looks, one webcam. The zoom holds up well past where a normal webcam turns to mush, and the mic pickup is good enough that people stop asking me to repeat myself. I care about this more than people expect: I want whoever I'm talking to on a call to feel like they're actually in the room with me.

The physical layer. Short takes only, and I wrote about the Supernote transition separately.

• Supernote Nomad. Distraction-free e-ink notes. Where my thinking happens before it becomes typing.
• Spiral notebook + EMSHOI dotted journals + Notsu daily and weekly cards. Analog task tracking next to Linear. There's something genuinely satisfying about handwriting a task, crossing it off, and finishing a whole list, plus the redundancy of glancing down and seeing everything I still have to do without opening an app.
• Elgato Key Light + Stream Deck. Video call lighting and one-button scene control.
• Logitech MX peripherals. The mouse and keyboard I stopped thinking about years ago.
• FiFine mic + Sony headphones + AirPods Pro. Sound in, sound out.
• Loop earplugs. Focus on demand.
• Neutonic. The productivity drink that survived my supplement graveyard. Morning focus, afternoon clarity.
• Edifier M60. These hifi speakers are by far best bang for buck. they sound so good.

Also on the desk (added since, pending a cleanup merge with the list above):

• iPad Mini + Apple Pencil. Replaced the Supernote Nomad above. I loved the writing feel on the Nomad, but it was slow, and I ended up frustrated more than I got into flow. The Pencil's gestures and pinch-to-change-tools turned out more intuitive than I expected. I bought the Nomad to help me stay in flow. The iPad actually does it.
• Two Logitech Litra lights, on top of the monitor, alongside the Elgato Key Light above.
• Kinesis Freestyle2 for Mac. Split ergonomic keyboard. Picked it up for RSI and kept it because I actually like typing on it, not just because my wrists needed it.
• MergeWorks standing desk + Autonomous ergo chair, both bought secondhand off Facebook Marketplace for about $50 and $100. A walking pad a friend gave me rounds out the setup.

Home base

I ran a smart home integration business, so this section could be its own site. The short version, and there's a longer AI-smart-home write-up here:

• Home Assistant. Local-first smart home control. The hub everything else answers to.
• Ubiquiti. Enterprise networking at home. Overkill is the point.
• Lutron. Rock solid local lighting. Has never once failed me, which is the whole review.
• Reolink. Cameras with color night vision, running locally.
• Sonos + Roku. Audio and streaming.
• Weber + ChefIQ. Because braai is a lifestyle, not a cooking method.

Tools I quit (and why)

Every tool above earned its spot. These didn't keep theirs. I think the quitting is more useful information than the keeping, so here's the graveyard with causes of death.

Why don't I use Zapier?

Zapier got me into automation and I'm grateful. But somewhere along the way it became the expensive default instead of the good choice. Task-based pricing punishes exactly the high-volume workflows automation is for, debugging multi-step zaps feels like archaeology, and the builder hides complexity instead of managing it. Make does the same job with better logic, better error handling, and better pricing. I'm actively migrating client workloads off Zapier today.

Why did I leave Calendly for Cal.com?

Calendly worked. Then every feature I needed moved up a pricing tier, the booking page got heavier, and I realized I was paying subscription rent for a calendar link. Cal.com is open source, faster, and does routing without the upsell dance. I left and never had a reason to look back.

Why won't I use QuickBooks?

I detest QuickBooks and everything Intuit makes. The product is a maze, the pricing is hostile, and the company's lobbying against simpler tax filing tells you everything about whose side it's on. Xero does the same job without making me angry. This is the strongest opinion on this page and I'm comfortable with that.

Why did I stop recommending Framer?

Framer is genuinely powerful for designers. That was the problem: I kept reaching for it to build simple pages and drowning in capability I didn't need. Then AI made "build me a landing page" a one-hour job in code I own. If you're a designer living in it daily, it's great. I wasn't.

Why am I sunsetting Noloco?

This one's nuanced: Noloco did nothing wrong. It let me stand up a client-facing app on Airtable fast, and I loved it for that. But the product it powered outgrew its data layer, and when the backend moved to Supabase, a real frontend came with it. Low-code app builders have a ceiling. We hit it. That's a graduation, not a failure. I wrote about knowing when to stop building for yourself, and this was the flip side: knowing when a tool's job is done.

The quick deaths

• Missive, Hey.com → Superhuman (2025). Two good email tools that lost to a faster one.
• Asana → Linear. No contest after week one.
• OpenClaw → Hermes (May 2026). Same agent, better runtime.

*

• Conductor → native Claude Code worktrees (June 2026). The platform caught up and ate the wrapper.
• Perplexity → retired from my daily stack (2026). Useful for sourced answers, but I am not using it anymore.
• Hyperagent → on pause/watchlist (2026). Browser automation with an agent brain still excites me, but I am not using it in the active stack right now.
• Octoparse, ParseHub → nothing. AI ate scraping.

Questions I actually get asked

Cal.com or Calendly?

Cal.com, without hesitation. It's open source, faster, and the routing features that cost extra on Calendly are just there. I switched after one too many price increases and the only thing I miss is nothing. If your whole company lives in Calendly already, the switching cost might not be worth it. For anyone starting fresh: Cal.com.

Xero or QuickBooks?

Xero. I detest QuickBooks and all Intuit products, and I run four businesses' books on Xero with an AI agent reading the P\&L daily through its API. QuickBooks has better US payroll integrations, I'll give it that. It's not enough.

Make.com or Zapier or n8n?

Make for businesses. It handles real branching logic, the error handling shows you exactly what failed, and the pricing doesn't punish volume. Zapier is easier for your first automation and I still moved everything off it. n8n if you're technical and want open source you can self-host. I'm migrating a client from Zapier to Make right now, which is the most honest answer I can give.

Ghost or Squarespace or Substack?

Depends who you are. I use Ghost because I want to own my content, my subscriber list, and my SEO, and I'm willing to maintain that ownership. Most people aren't, and shouldn't be: use Squarespace for a beautiful site that just works. Substack if the newsletter is the whole product and you want its network. Ghost is for people who read the terms of service and flinched.

Relay or Mercury for Profit First banking?

Relay. It's the only bank I've found that treats multiple sub-accounts as the default instead of a workaround, which is exactly what Profit First needs. Mercury is excellent too, especially for startups holding venture money. For a Profit First operator, Relay fits like it was built for the book. Because it basically was.

What's your AI coding setup?

Claude Code as the daily driver, Codex running parallel implementation work, both operating on the same repos with worktrees keeping them out of each other's way. An agent on a server handles the operational layer: briefs, follow-ups, filing. The honest answer is that the setup matters less than the context you feed it. My agents work because they can read ten years of my notes and every decision I've documented.

Do you get paid to recommend these tools?

Sometimes, and you'll always know when. Links marked "(affiliate link)" pay me a commission. Everything else pays me nothing, including some of the tools I praise hardest on this page. Linear, Obsidian, Supabase, Superhuman, and Hookdeck have no affiliate program at all; they're here because I use them. I was using every tool on this page before any of them paid me a cent, and the graveyard above shows what happens to tools that stop earning their place.

I'm Rob Weidner, a four-time founder and automation consultant in Austin, Texas. I run my consulting practice and three products on exactly the stack above, and my clients hire me to build theirs. More about me here, or find me on LinkedIn.

Have a tool recommendation? Contact me. I'm always testing new things, and the graveyard always has room.