The toolbox
80 tools worth knowing about if you build with AI. No affiliate links, no paid placement, and no prices quoted β tiers change monthly and a stale price helps nobody.
Claude
freemiumAnthropic's assistant and model family, widely used for coding, long-context reasoning and agentic workflows.
Best for: Coding and long-context work
Claude Developer Platform
paidAnthropic's API and console for building applications on Claude models, with SDKs for major languages.
Best for: Building apps on Claude
ChatGPT
freemiumOpenAI's assistant for general reasoning, drafting and code, available on the web and desktop.
Best for: General-purpose assistance
OpenAI Platform
paidOpenAI's API platform for text, image, audio and embedding models, with SDKs and an agents toolkit.
Best for: Building on GPT models
Google AI Studio
freemiumGoogle's browser workspace for prototyping with Gemini models and generating API keys and starter code.
Best for: Prototyping with Gemini
Mistral AI
freemiumEuropean model provider offering open-weight and commercial models plus an API and the Le Chat assistant.
Best for: European open-weight models
DeepSeek
freemiumModel provider known for open-weight reasoning and coding models offered through an API and chat interface.
Best for: Low-cost reasoning models
Llama
open-sourceMeta's family of open-weight language models that can be downloaded and run on your own infrastructure.
Best for: Self-hosted open-weight models
Ollama
open-sourceTool for downloading and running open-weight models locally, exposing them through a local API.
Best for: Running models on your machine
OpenRouter
paidSingle API endpoint that routes requests across many model providers with unified billing and fallbacks.
Best for: Switching models without rewrites
Groq
freemiumInference provider running open models on custom hardware for high token throughput and low latency.
Best for: Very fast inference
Hugging Face
freemiumHub for open models, datasets and demo spaces, plus libraries and hosted inference endpoints.
Best for: Finding open models and datasets