my actual AI stack for shipping real products
Not "tools you should try." The exact stack I use to ship AI products at Zela — start to finish, what's free, what I pay for, and why.
why this list is different
I build AI products for a living. So this isn't a wishlist — it's what's open on my machine right now, shipping a real company.
the stack
Ideation & specs. A strong reasoning model does the first draft of every spec.
Code. A coding model for the boilerplate, me for the architecture.
Assets. Free local image generation for placeholders, paid only when a client asset needs to be pixel-final.
Infra. This is where I do pay, and gladly.
the principle
Spend money where failure is expensive (infra, data) and save it where failure is free (drafts, placeholders, experiments). You're welcome.
opensourceguy
I find them so you don’t have to.
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keep reading
how to tell AI hype from a tool that actually works
A 4-question test I run on every "game-changing" AI tool before it gets a single second of airtime.
the free AI tools that actually replace paid ones (2026)
I ran the free tiers until they broke. Here are the ones that genuinely replace a paid subscription — and the three that don't, no matter what the thread says.