There’s a new AI tool every week. Most of them are forgettable. A few of them are quietly changing how we build everything. Here are the five we use almost every day, ranked by how much we’d cry if they disappeared.
1. Claude Code (the obvious one)
Yes, we’re a Claude Code course. Yes, this is biased. But hear us out: we both spent years using every other AI coding tool on the market, and Claude Code is the first one that feels like a real teammate instead of a fancy autocomplete.
The reason is simple: Claude actually plans. It reads your codebase before writing anything. It asks clarifying questions. It pushes back when you ask for something dumb. It’s the difference between “AI that types fast” and “AI that thinks first.”
Cost: Free tier exists. Pro is $20/mo and worth every penny if you build anything.
2. Vercel (deploy in 60 seconds)
Vercel is where you put a website to make it live on the internet. That’s the entire pitch. You connect it to a GitHub repo, push your code, and 60 seconds later it’s live at a real URL you can share.
Every project we build for the course gets deployed to Vercel. Every student site you see in our gallery is on Vercel. We’ve never had a single problem.
Cost: Free for personal projects (and that’s a generous free).
3. Supabase (your free backend)
Supabase is the second-best thing about building software in 2026. It’s a free, open-source backend that gives you a database, user authentication (Google, magic links, you name it), file storage, and real-time updates — in about 90 seconds of setup.
Before Supabase, building anything that needed users to log in or save data was a multi-week project. Now it’s a checkbox.
Cost: Free tier is enough to launch and get your first 10,000 users.
4. Stripe (when you’re ready to make money)
Stripe is how you take credit card payments on the internet. That’s it. It’s the universal default and there’s a reason — the API is brilliant, the docs are even better, and you can be live in an hour.
If you’re building anything that you eventually want to charge for — even a $5 one-time digital download — you want Stripe. We cover the entire integration in module 8 of the challenge.
Cost: Free to set up. They take a small percentage when you actually make a sale.
5. Notion (the secret weapon)
Notion isn’t an AI tool, but it’s the place where all our AI work begins. It’s where we draft the prompt, plan the project, dump our notes, write the launch copy, and keep track of every project we’re working on.
The honest truth: most of the “hard part” of vibe coding isn’t the coding. It’s the thinking before the coding. Notion is where we do the thinking.
Cost: Free for personal use.
Honorable mentions
- Cursor — another great AI coding tool. We use Claude Code more, but Cursor is excellent if you prefer a full IDE.
- Loom — for recording quick walkthroughs (especially when explaining things to your future self).
- Resend — the simplest way to send transactional email from your app. We use it on every project.
- Tailwind CSS — not an AI tool, but Claude writes Tailwind beautifully. Default to it.
What’s NOT on this list (and why)
People ask us about ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Bolt, Lovable, v0, Replit, Bubble — all of them. They’re all fine. Some of them are great. We’re not on a crusade against any of them.
But the workflow above — Claude Code + Vercel + Supabase + Stripe + Notion — is the smallest, cheapest, most flexible stack we’ve found that lets you build literally any kind of website, app, or online business as a Christian creator. And almost all of it is free until you start making money.
Pick the tools. Pick a project. Ship something this week.
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