EMILY'S STACK

The tools I actually ship with

Every tool below earns its keep in my consulting practice. No paid placements. No "10 best" listicle filler. If it's here, it's because removing it would make my work materially worse.

Heads up: some links are referral or affiliate links. If you sign up through them I sometimes get a credit or commission, often you do too. I'd recommend every one of these even if no link paid out, which is how I picked them in the first place.

AI Layer (where everything starts)

Anthropic Claude primary

Plan I use: Claude Pro + API access · Used daily for: every build, every doc, every client review

Claude Opus and Sonnet are the workhorses behind nearly everything I ship. Sonnet for routine work, Opus when the answer matters, Haiku in API automations where latency matters. The Claude Code CLI plus the MCP ecosystem is the closest thing the industry has to a real agentic dev environment.

Try Claude Claude Code

Cursor primary

Plan: Pro · Used for: AI-native editing, refactors, paired with Claude Code for parallel work

When I'm in a long refactor or unfamiliar codebase, Cursor's tab completion plus chat is faster than any other IDE setup I've used. I keep Claude Code in one terminal and Cursor in the editor.

Try Cursor

Voice + Multimodal

ElevenLabs primary

Plan: Creator · Used for: voice clones, voice agents, voiceover for client decks

PVCs (Professional Voice Clones) are eerily good. I have my own cloned voice for asynchronous outreach, and have built receptionist agents on top of their voice models for clients. The API is solid and the latency is acceptable for real conversational use.

Try ElevenLabs

Plaud.ai primary

Plan: Hardware + Plaud Plus · Used for: ambient meeting capture and dictation

Wearable AI recorder. I pipe Plaud transcripts into custom MCP agents for structured action-item extraction and CRM updates. Better than the alternatives I've tried for always-on capture without burning phone battery.

Try Plaud

Infrastructure That Doesn't Get In My Way

Cloudflare Workers primary

Plan: Workers Paid ($5/mo) · Used for: every edge function, every agent webhook, every micro-product

Where I deploy everything that doesn't need a database. Edge runtime, fast cold starts, free CDN. The Worker + KV + D1 + R2 stack is genuinely powerful and underrated for solo-builder economics.

Try Cloudflare

Vercel primary

Plan: Pro · Used for: every Next.js client app, every web frontend that needs ISR or proper Node SSR

Where Cloudflare ends and the Next.js app starts. Vercel still has the best Next.js deploy experience and the previews-per-PR flow is non-negotiable for client work. Pair it with Cloudflare in front for DNS and you get the best of both.

Try Vercel

Supabase primary

Plan: Pro · Used for: every client app with a real database, RLS-gated multi-tenancy, auth

Postgres with batteries included. Row Level Security plus auth plus realtime plus edge functions plus pgvector means one tool covers 80 percent of what a typical SaaS needs. The migrations flow with their CLI is clean.

Try Supabase

Ops + Knowledge

Notion primary

Plan: Plus + Notion AI · Used for: client engagement hubs, project tracking, async knowledge

Every client engagement gets a Notion hub with the same structure: tracker, project log, decision log, weekly review. The AI in Notion isn't its best feature, but the database flexibility plus collab is unbeaten for ops.

Try Notion

Make.com primary

Plan: Core · Used for: integration glue that's not worth coding

When a workflow needs 4 services chained and I don't want to maintain code. Better than Zapier for visual debugging and complex multi-branch logic, cheaper than n8n self-hosted once you factor in operations cost.

Try Make

Payments + Distribution

Stripe no fee

Plan: Standard · Used for: client billing, Payment Links, hosted checkout

It just works. Use Stripe Payment Links for one-off invoices, subscriptions for retained clients, and Atlas if you're forming a US LLC for global SaaS. Their docs are still the gold standard.

Try Stripe

Gumroad cheap

Plan: Free, 10% per sale · Used for: digital product distribution, info-product launches

Cheapest, simplest way to sell a digital product from scratch. The discovery is weak, but you bring your own audience anyway. Where I list my AI Ops Pack and any new info-products.

Try Gumroad

How I pick a tool. Three criteria, every time. (1) Does this remove a real-time bottleneck or just feel productive? (2) Will I still use it 12 months from now without resenting the bill? (3) Is there a free open-source alternative that's actually as good, or am I paying for convenience that's worth it? If a tool fails any of these I cancel it. This page is the survivors.