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What are the 5 tools you simply couldn't do your work without?

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This could be related to your industry, or even a side project you're working on.

Here are my 5 (I couldn't function without them):

  1. Grammarly – proofreading my texts, not just posts, but also client communication

  2. ChatGPT / Claude – mostly brainstorming, help with copy, and summarising

  3. Figma – I can put the basic graphics together quickly.

  4. Translator – sounds incredibly old-school, but English is not my mother tongue

  5. Gmail – and not only for communication, but also for storing ideas and sending myself email reminders for posts

[and soon one more that I am working on – – prevents me from being banned on LinkedIn, so I will not lose my account.]

What are your five?

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Mine, building CancelKit solo:

1) Claude / Claude Code - pair-programming partner for basically everything, from architecture to catching bugs

2) Stripe - the backbone of the whole product (my product literally exists because of Stripe cancel flows)

3) Supabase - auth + Postgres, would take 10x longer without it

4) Vercel - deploy and forget, same as a few others said above

5) Notion - the only place my todos and half-finished ideas don't get lost

Funny how much of this thread is Claude/ChatGPT + Supabase + Vercel - feels like that's becoming the default solo-founder stack.

My five right now:

1. ChatGPT / Codex — turning rough ideas into working prototypes  
2. GitHub — version control and simple deployments  
3. Supabase — collecting real validation data without building a full backend  
4. Playwright — testing flows and recording product demos  
5. Remotion — creating short product videos with code  

I’m currently using this stack to validate Clip2Map, a small project that turns saved food videos into a restaurant map.

And I relate to the translator choice. English isn’t my first language either, so translation tools are quietly essential.

I myself get rid of most of my daily tool collection because of flownotch app:

  1. Claude and Chatgpt

  2. FlowNotch app

  3. Terminal only

  4. Spotify

For me it would be:

  1. Claude - Claude Code for coding and Claude Design for marketing material

  2. Cursor/VSCode - Just a solid IDE

  3. Davinci Resolve - For video editing marketing material

  4. YouTube - Learning and entertainment

I've seen a bunch of people mention Figma, but tbh I don't really understand why, could somebody brief me on why it's so good? Just seems like an extra layer of friction.

my 5:

1. claude - drafting, debug loops, thinking through positioning

2. threads - the professional network that actually replaced my linkedin scroll

3. product hunt - what everyone actually shipped this week, in one page

4. notion - writing docs, campaign planning, meeting notes

5. loom - recording context for teammates faster than typing it

the one that surprises me most is threads. the vibes are different from linkedin and it turns out my industry lives there now.

  • Pinterest – mood boarding. Before I touch a single UI element, I'm pinning references until a visual direction actually clicks.

  • AI agents – less for "writing code for me," more as a thinking partner when I'm stuck on architecture or naming something.

  • Pen and paper – still the fastest way to think. Nothing replaces sketching a flow before it becomes a UI.

  • People – sounds obvious but it's the most underrated one. Real user testing and just talking to people who'd actually use the thing catches more than any tool does.

  • Reddit – for ideation. Lurking in the right subreddits surfaces problems people are actually complaining about, which beats guessing at features in a vacuum.

Solo founder, so my five are unglamorous:

1. Google Search Console — I open it more than my email. Organic is my only free acquisition channel, and GSC is the only thing that tells me the truth about it.

2. Firebase — auth, database, functions. One person can't run infrastructure. This is the closest thing I have to a team.

3. cPanel — I know. Everyone here is on Vercel and I'm dragging files into a file manager. It costs nothing, it has never woken me up at 2am, and I've stopped apologising for it.

4. Claude / ChatGPT — not for copy. For auditing my own work, which is the thing I'd otherwise skip. This week it caught a canonical tag on my highest-traffic page still pointing at a URL I'd rebranded away from months ago — quietly handing every rupee of ad spend to the wrong page. I would never have gone looking for that.

5. Razorpay — because a tool nobody pays for is a hobby.

@Nika, the translator one landed. English is my second language too, and the thing nobody says out loud is that grammar isn't the hard part — register is. I can write a perfectly correct sentence that still reads like a press release.

Genuine question for the Figma people: do you actually design in it, or is it mostly somewhere to arrange screenshots before shipping? I've never got past the second one and I keep assuming I'm missing something.

I am more on the app dev side, but my top 5:

  1. Claude Code

  2. NoMac

  3. OtaKit

  4. TikTok

  5. Google/Apple Ads

Right now my top five are:

1. Copilot/Claude/ChatGPT
2. Visual Studio Code
3. Arch Linux
4. A Mac Mini for cross-building
5. An iPhone and an Android, for testing and crossbuilding

According to my Dia Browser (it forgot to add itself):

1. Atlassian (Jira/Confluence) — by far your heaviest hands-on tool. 1.3h of focused time and ~1,500 keystrokes across recent sessions. This is where your real work gets done.

  1. Google Calendar — used today, 100+ visits. Your day runs on it.

  2. Notion — your docs and planning hub, signed in and active across multiple days.

  3. Canva — your go-to for quick visuals and decks, used today.

  4. Slack — team comms, signed in and installed locally. The “everything dies without it” pick, as one commenter put it.

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