Just asking, QuickBooks? Google Sheets? Something you hacked together with AI?

We built a very simple AI-driven tool and want to hear what s working (or not) for early-stage teams.

A platform ( canivibecodeit) recently went viral on X for showing which paid tools you could realistically rebuild yourself.

Design tools, ChatGPT, or Claude are obviously hard to replace. But invoice tools, forms, simple CMSs, or dictation apps seem much more realistic.

From what I am seeing across communities, here is what the tool stack looks like right now.

The Core Stack

Email & Capture: Mailchimp for launch updates and email sequences . Carrd for quick, clean launch-specific landing pages . Pre-launch tools like LaunchBuddy and Prefundia to build a waitlist and gather early feedback before you even hit the Product Hunt button .

Social & Scheduling: Buffer or Hootsuite to keep a consistent presence across X, LinkedIn, and Threads without it taking over your entire day . Canva for generating graphics that do not look like you threw them together in five minutes .

@Toyo is a platform where AI agents run your business operations, not just assist with them. Think of it like a team of new hires who work around the clock: researching, writing, building, following up. No technical skills required. You brief them like you'd brief a team member, they get to work.

They recently announced a $4.3M seed round, and are launching on @Product Hunt today.

How are you covering the monthly costs of building your B2C or B2B startup? The virtual office, phone service, domain hosting, Supabase or Firebase, and other recurring expenses add up. How do you fund these odds and ends, and what cost-saving hacks help you get the most bang for your proverbial buck before revenue starts coming in?

I have two startups, so the overhead can be overwhelming. Still, I decided long ago that it was in my best financial interest to focus primarily on my startup needs and find free workarounds for my wants. For example, Canva is a low-cost design service, but I opted for a free Affinity account for most of my immediate needs. It requires more manual labor and a bit of design skill, but I m saving $15-$20/month. It s minimal, but I would rather spend that $20/month on Resend for my email needs than on design extras.
How are you managing?

Vokal got #2 product of the day and #7 of the week, and we now have 100+ signups from startups and teams. In general, people seem excited to try it out to up-level their teams to agent native.

Now I m trying to figure out the next step: how do we scale this beyond manual founder-led work?

I ve been writing posts, sharing content, and doing outreach manually, but it s starting to feel like a constant drain and a bottleneck. I ve been looking into tools like HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, and Clay.

For people who have used any of these: what has your experience been? Which ones are actually worth it at an early stage?

I'll start.

Supabase. Found it here three years ago. Thought it was just another backend. Now I can't imagine building without it.

Here's what it does for us at Rankfender:

Auth that doesn't make you crazy. We have users across 120+ countries. Supabase handles sign-ups, logins, password resets, magic links, OAuth with Google and GitHub. It just works. We didn't have to build any of it.

1. A 3-year search for a simple tool to track both personal and business finances in one place. Nothing fits.

2. Website owners constantly need minor edits in the admin panel. They are forced to pay specialists for 5-minute tasks. We need an AI agent that does this on command in the browser.

3. An indie hacker spends 20-30 hours manually cold launching each new product in directories, Reddit, and blogs. There is no tool that fully automates this and proves its effectiveness.

4. A freelancer often loses in proposal competitions due to the inability to quickly create personalized and visual website concepts for each job order.

5. A Telegram channel owner is losing their audience without understanding the reasons for unsubscriptions. There is no simple tool for automatically collecting feedback from departed subscribers.

If you're a SaaS, digital product, agency or freelancer what payment gateways do you use to handle local methods, taxes and subscriptions?

PayPal charges me 5% per transaction and their support is unwilling to reduce it to 3% for me while I know they do lower the transaction fee for certain accounts.

Over the past few years, I ve ended up with a scattered stack of tools domains, SaaS subscriptions, plugins, licenses, hosting, etc.

Some are in Google Keep, some in emails, and others I forgot I even signed up for.

I m curious how do you track everything you ve purchased for your projects or startup?

• Do you use a password manager?

• Manual spreadsheet?

• Some kind of custom-built dashboard?

Hey friends!

I m Arina, the marketing manager at EasyStaff as many of you already know.

Today, I m sharing something that means a lot to me and to our entire team (thx @edgalimov).

I was recently talking with a group of founders, and we went around sharing tools we're using now. Posting my notes for our community here - would love to know what else people are using!

Voice AI toolkit:

- Vapi

Hey Product Hunt!

I m Simona a finance & business consultant who spent the last 10 months building a full software product solo, without a developer background.