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The stack · September 2026

What I actually use.

One person, a web studio in Boise, real clients on monthly plans. This is the whole list, what each tool is for, and what it costs me. No affiliate links.

Websites

Claude Code$20 to $200 a month

Builds the site from a brief, a stated visual direction and one file of business facts. Every client site since June 2026 came out of it.

Tailwind v4 + Motionfree

Styling and animation. Motion does the scroll-driven pieces: pinned hero, word-by-word fill, sticky stacking cards.

Lenisfree

Smooth scroll, switched off for people who set reduced motion.

Playwright + axefree

Checks before every launch: accessibility, overflow at seven widths, layout shift, broken images, and a score for how AI-generated the page looks.

cPanel or Netlify$3 to $19 a month per site

Hosting in the client's name, never mine. They can fire me and keep everything.

Words

Claudeincluded above

Drafts, rewrites, contracts, client emails. Runs with a written ban list of the phrases that read as generated.

ChatGPT$20 a month

Second opinion on anything I am about to send a client.

Images

The client's own photosfree

First choice every time. A real photo of the shop beats any generated one, and we never publish AI photos of a business as if they were real.

Nano Banana + GPT Imagepay per image

Abstract art, figures for videos, product mockups. Never people, never storefronts.

Pexelsfree

When there are no photos yet and the owner has approved a stand-in.

Video

Remotionfree

Motion graphics written in React: title cards, logo pops, counters, the phone mockups in the Reels.

Higgsfieldpay per clip

Generated clips and figures when a shot needs something that does not exist yet.

ffmpegfree

Cuts, captions, loudness. Every finished video passes through it once.

Voice

ElevenLabs$5 to $22 a month

The narration on the videos. I do not like being on camera, so the voice does the talking.

Whisperfree

Times every spoken word so captions land on the word, not near it.

Research

Perplexity + Geminifree tiers

Competitor scans, pricing checks, "what does this business actually sell" before a demo build.

Claude in Chromeincluded above

Reads the pages I am logged into: analytics, Gumroad, Reddit, the hosting panel. Fills forms so I do not.

The boring stuff

Zapierfree tier

Form submissions to email, new sale to spreadsheet, the plumbing nobody sees.

Gumroad10% of each sale

Sells the two kits below. Handles tax, delivery and refunds so I never touch a card number.

The two things I wrote down.

Buildsite is the system that makes Claude Code produce sites that do not look AI-made: twelve visual directions, the ban list, the motion recipes, the checks. After the Demo is everything that happens once a client says yes: contract, pricing sheet, handoff, first-client script.

See both kits Need a site instead?