AI is moving fast. Every day there s a new tool promising leverage. Most don t stick.

In 2025, the tools that mattered weren t the flashiest.
They were the ones that quietly saved time on work I already did every day.

Some are now non-negotiable.
Others are on my watchlist because they could replace entire steps, not just speed them up.

What AI tools actually earned a permanent spot in your workflow in 2025?
And which ones do you think will matter in 2026?

We ve literally spent the whole summer working on this.
Long nights, countless iterations, and endless feedback loops.

Starting tomorrow, Crono 2.0 will be live for everyone.

We began with a massive problem (source: Gartner):
83% of sales teams today lack the basic capabilities to run outbound sales effectively.

And yet, humans remain essential to the sales process so much so that 40% of AI SDR projects will be shut down by the end of 2026 (again, according to Gartner).

Last week, OpenAI announced a full-year free subscription for Indian users starting November 4.
On top of that, they ve rolled out a Learning Accelerator program offering 5 lakh ChatGPT licenses to students and educators, and begun hiring engineers in Bengaluru.

So why the sudden focus?

Here s my take:

• India is now OpenAI s 2nd-largest user base, and probably the fastest-growing.

• By locking in early brand trust and language familiarity, OpenAI is essentially building a moat for the next billion users.

• The country has 700 million + internet users, but very low per-capita SaaS/AI spending. That s a huge conversion opportunity.

• Local competition is heating up as Perplexity, Gemini, and even smaller Indian startups are fighting for daily-use adoption.

We got 5 Leads from Product Hunt last week!
It didn t happen overnight.
We stayed active on forum threads, joined conversations, and showed up for the community.
Here s what we did:
Stayed consistent on Product Hunt discussions and threads.
Divided the pool between those who already launched and those planning to launch.
For those who had launched, we asked if they needed the solution we re building at Flexprice.
For those preparing to launch, we helped, shared notes, answered questions, and stayed available.
That s where the leads came from.
We realised one thing; when you show up for the community, it always gives back.
How have you benefitted from Product Hunt so far?

Hi everyone!

Just curious, who here is launching on Product Hunt this November?

Would love to follow your drops, support, and see what everyone s been building.

Everyone says execution matters most.

But I think it s execution in the right way
The kind that runs experiments, not marathons.

It s easy to move fast.

It s harder to design motion that actually teaches you something.

Over time, I ve realized how much effort we put into our websites on landing pages, pricing, testimonials, product tours and yet, most visitors only ever deeply interact with one or two sections depending on your ICP.

• For developer-first products, that s usually docs.

• For consumer apps, maybe it s onboarding or pricing.

• For enterprise tools, perhaps case studies or ROI calculators.

The rest is mostly noise or at least secondary.

It made me wonder:

Yesterday, I had a chat with a founder who s launching on Product Hunt next week.

He said: We ve got a community of 500+ people. Getting Product of the Day should be easy.

So I asked one question:

How many of them have an active Product Hunt accounts that are at least 4 6 weeks old?

Almost every team building usage-based or credit-based pricing I ve talked to says something like:

We just have to aggregate events, multiply with a price, and send it to Stripe.

Shouldn t take more than a week.

For years, SaaS pricing revolved around seats.

If you're adding more teammates then pay more.

This was simple, predictable and scalable.

When we launched Flexprice, I thought Product Hunt success was about chasing upvotes.

I was wrong.

It s really about momentum, community, and showing up prepared.

Here are a few lessons we learned the hard way but I hope they save someone a few gray hairs before their launch day:

The @v0 by Vercel team recently dug into industry trends to publish the first State of Vibe Coding report.

My key takeaways:

1. Everyone can build: 63% of vibe coding users are non-developers, generating UIs (44%), full-stack apps (20%), and personal software (11%).

2. Adoption is everywhere, with significant adoption rates in APAC (40.7%), Europe (18.1%), North America (13.9%), and LATAM (13.8%).

3. 92% of US developers use AI coding tools every day

4. 30% of new code at @Google is generated by AI

5. 25% of @Y Combinator startups rely on AI-generated code

6. Rapid expansion has a cost. Vibe coding apps keep hitting vulnerabilities: exposing secrets, access misconfigurations, hardcoded credentials.

7. The future: going mainstream or hitting its sweet spot in working MVPs, the vibe coding trend is here to stay, and it's happening now.

We ve spent years normalizing failure in AI workflows:

LLMs hallucinate.

Agents crash.

Retries are normal.

I have been a Product Hunt user for 5 years now, and it's been amazing to see how much the platform has evolved.

That said, I sometimes feel the absence of AI-native features. Things like smart filtering of fake profiles during the signup stage, automated link health checks on launch pages, or even an AI-driven support assistant (remember the old chat widget?).

Sometimes I have a problem to have a look at my past milestones or things I have achieved so far.
When I think about it, even creating my first product was a success for me. I ve always been a bit shy and afraid to show what I was working on, or I just didn t know how to present it properly, so it took me a really long time.

My first product was an online workout program with a payment gateway, and the monthly price was ridiculously low. But I managed to monetise it and had my first customers. I was probably around 20 at the time.

• What was your first product?

• What would you do differently to maintain it and make it successful?

• What lesson did you learn from it?

Still feels unreal. You can now use Pretty Prompt entirely from your keyboard, no mouse needed .

One of the biggest blockers for me to adopt new products is how easy it is to use them.

And for Pretty Prompt, was to always using the mouse to click in order to improve a prompt.

Hi everyone,

I am Koshima, co founder of Flexprice.io, an open-source metering and billing platform for AI & Agentic companies.

In simple words, you can call us Chargebee for AI and Agentic companies. You can launch usage based pricing, credits, and enterprise contracts, so your engineers can focus on building product, not billing.

When we launched our product here in April 2025, the playbook was quite different:

• Create a Coming Soon page

• Build your network through the Notify Me page

• Let Product Hunt notify everyone on launch day

• Launch, celebrate, and (hopefully) trend

We followed that playbook to the dot and ended up winning #1 Product of the Day.

The network effect from that launch still brings traffic even today.

I ve been here for almost three years, and over time, I ve started to see this platform as a social network.

I know that many people come to launch their products and, due to time constraints, do not have time to establish a strong presence here, but I m glad some regular users focus on building the community.

SF is buzzing this week, but the question travels: how do you actually meet the right people (cofounders, investors, collaborators, etc.) without burning the night? What works for me: be visible (present/pitch if possible instant context), be memorable (two-liner like I spent a decade in meetings at Apple left to fix that ), and be intentional (goal: 5 useful connections, 1 investor intro keep moving every 3 5 minutes).

Here's my simple framework:

• Intent Target Ask (why you re here, who you need, concrete next step).

• Anchor to the moment ( What stood out from the talk? ).

• Exit cleanly ( Great chat mind if I send that link tonight? ).