8 Free AI Tools Every Claude User Must Use

0:00 So, free tool number one is lavish, and this fundamentally changed how I use Claude. You see, the people who build the fastest with Claude spend a ton of their time planning what they want

0:07 Claude to actually build. But, when you're planning anything complex, going through the plan in a chat interface is extremely overwhelming. You'll get walls of text, you'll have to scroll up and

0:16 down, and you'll have to try and remember what you decided three messages ago and what's still pending. So, instead of all that, I use lavish, which creates a visual document of your plan,

0:25 and you can add comments directly on it as you iterate through it. On screen, you can see a lavish I created while planning this video out about these eight tools. So, what I was able to do

0:34 is if I didn't like the order of the tools, I could add a comment like switch lavish to tool number one, or I could add another comment that's change this tool with this tool. And then, once I'm

0:43 done reviewing it, I can hit send to agent, and it'll update the plan automatically. This visual process of planning has personally changed how I build almost everything. And clearly,

0:52 this is both for technical and non-technical work. But, if you are building any sort of app or visual tool, it can show you a mock-up of the design before building it, which is extremely

1:02 powerful. Now, I've added a link to lavish below, which is where you'll find every plugin that I mentioned in this entire video. And to set up any of these, just bring it into Claude and say

1:11 download lavish along with the link, and it'll take it from there. Now, that's easy first of eight free AI tools I'm going through that will help you build 10 times faster and save you money in

1:19 the process. Now, the next two tools that I'm going to cover are explicitly so that you don't hit your token limits. Tool number two is RTK, which will help you stop paying for things that you

1:28 shouldn't be paying for. So, RTK stands for Rust Token Killer, which essentially means save you money. So, how does it actually do this? Well, most of you have experienced your AI tools hitting a

1:38 token limit. And a big reason for this is that Claude reads way more information than it actually needs. So, in the ideal world, you'd only share it the text that actually matters. To put

1:47 an example to this, let's say you change one page of a 10-page client report and ask Claude to review it. A person would just typically read the page that changed, but often Claude will just look

1:57 at the entire thing by default. So, the fix for this is to filter what Claude sees so it only sees the information that matters most. So, normally, right, Claude makes a change, checks its work

2:08 by running a command, and the fully raw output gets dumped into Claude. Let's say that's about 15,000 tokens. When you integrate RTK, it's the same change, the same check, but RTK will actually strip

2:18 all the unnecessary text, and then it'll land in Claude closer to about 1,800 tokens. And now, in their documents themselves, they claim a 60 to 90% token reduction, but that really depends on

2:27 what you're doing. And this is effective for people who are technical or not technical. And now, to be clear, that this only covers what commands send back to Claude, so it won't cut your total

2:35 token consumption by 60 to 90%, but this is a big step in the right direction. Now, I've linked this below, and you can run a similar command to what we did in tool one to get it all set up. What

2:45 we're covering here, paired with Claude, will help you build almost anything. A tool, a site, a whole product, but once it's live, the question actually changes. It's not can I build this, it's

2:54 is anyone actually going to pay for this? And if so, how can I get more people to pay for it? Which brings us today's video sponsor, Wopp. When you start a business or want to scale your

3:02 current business, there are two key questions that you have to answer. The first, how will you receive payments? And there are a number of providers, but I chose Wopp to run my business through

3:09 because it is the cheapest way to accept payments, and with its flexible checkout options, it makes it so that I can create a plan that works for our customers. And this is nice, and I love

3:19 the cheap fees, but that wasn't the thing that interests me the most. The second question is, how can I get more people to pay for my service? And for me and most people, this question isn't

3:28 easy to answer. So, personally, I get traffic from Instagram, YouTube, my newsletter, all over the place, and it's hard to see who's actually converting. And plus, with my old setup, I couldn't

3:37 see which of those people actually paid. But Wopp puts the web traffic and the conversion analytics all in one place. And to set this up, I went to their dashboard, they had a single Claude

3:46 prompt that I was able to copy and paste into Claude, and it set it all up for me. Now, when someone lands on the site, Wappsie's what page they look at and a full history of their interactions and

3:56 then ties a sale back to the visit. So, I can see visitors, page views, and the revenue that came from the site all in one page and spot the exact step where people drop. Now, getting the data is

4:04 just part of it, but you have to then act on it, which is where Wappsie's economic intelligence comes in. What this does is it looks at all my data and tells me the single best thing that I

4:12 should do next to grow my business. This can be optimizing a page, launching an ad campaign, and in this case, it actually suggests that I add payment plans to my funnel to help convert more

4:21 buyers. And I actually went and did that and it helped me convert people to paying customers. So, whether you're starting something new or already have a business that you want to scale, sign up

4:28 for Wappsie using the link in the description. Going to the next tool, which is Caveman and Ponytail, which is about making Claude write less. So, yes, this actually is a two-for-one, but

4:37 there's a good reason to use both and they solve a similar problem, so it made sense to actually group them together. So, the problem that these are solving is when Claude sends back a super long

4:46 answer that's hard to follow, it's costing you in two ways. So, it's costing you in time, right? Because you have to read the whole response and digest it. And it's also costing you

4:54 money because that's tokens spent. See, the last tool, RTK, that we covered, that was about saving tokens on the input. This will help you save tokens on Claude's output. See, Caveman and

5:04 Ponytail are designed to constrain the output that Claude produces. So, going through Ponytail first, this forces Claude to write less code. And it does this by stopping Claude from

5:13 overbuilding and instead reaching for the simplest thing that works. And in terms of what this actually impacts, pulling directly from Ponytail's readme, it says, "Write approximately 54% less

5:22 code, up to 94%, approximately 20% cheaper, and 27% faster." Now, whether or not it hits those baselines, I don't think it really matters. It's about simplifying the code and the output that

5:32 it produces because Claude often makes things way too complicated. Now, going to the next tool is Caveman, and this is all about sending you a response with fewer words. This does exactly what it

5:42 sounds like. It makes Claude answer you like a caveman. So, it'll remove all the filler and it'll keep all the substance. Now, you guys know that I'll bring in TV show references whenever I think it

5:51 applies and this actually reminds me of an office quote from Kevin. So, here's him just talking about how he wants to be more efficient with his words. >> Why waste time say lot word when few

6:01 word do trick? >> Now, in that clip, Kevin is literally just saving tokens. Now, before I dive into like a before and after using Caveman, if you do like when I bring in

6:10 these types of references, let me know in the comments because I personally love doing it. I'm just wondering if they resonate. So, anyway, Caveman is what forces your AI output to sound like

6:18 Kevin. So, on the left, you can actually see an output before Caveman and then on the right is the after. You can see it it looks sounds like a caveman which if nothing else it keeps it fun, but it

6:28 does get rid of all of the fluff, makes it more efficient, and it cuts through the noise. To install both, here is a prompt you can paste straight into Claude. So far we've been talking about

6:36 free tools that enhance Claude, but what about the tools that Claude already has inside of it? Going to tool number four, which is Claude code projects. And this is not what you think it is. So, I

6:45 recently made a video about the optimal Claude setup and I explicitly said don't use Claude projects. But now I'm saying use Claude projects? Well, it's actually two different features. See, Claude

6:56 recently announced a new feature called Claude code projects. And yes, they're using the same name and I'm going to have to message the Anthropic team about this because frankly, it is a little too

7:06 confusing. But this is actually a new feature and it is fundamentally different in terms of how it operates. And honestly, this feature alone, I may make an entire video on this because it

7:15 really is such a powerful way to interact with AI. So, first, what is it? If you've ever worked on multiple things in Claude at the same time, which you probably have, you've likely thought

7:24 which chat should I put this in or is this supposed to go in this one or that one? Or you just find yourself constantly switching between conversations and it's just burdensome.

7:33 So, this problem was so profound that Claude actually built a feature to solve it. So, here's a tweet, but a project is one conversation with Claude. It splits the work into threads itself, runs them

7:42 as parallel cloud sessions, passes context between them, and keeps going when you leave. So, in practice, what this means is you talk to one Claude terminal, and it hands pieces of work to

7:53 other Claudes and manages them accordingly. Now, to access this feature, it's currently rolling out to Pro and Max users for free, and you'll find it in the left side while in Claude

8:02 Code under a projects tab. But, if you don't see it yet, it'll likely come up soon, but if you want something similar in the meantime, there is an open-source alternative called First Mate, and it's

8:11 actually created by Kun Chan who made Lavish, which is the first tool that we went through. Now, that is a lot more technical, and I won't do a deep dive on it, but it's linked below. And this

8:18 process and framework is exactly what my team has been using for quite a while as we work directly with companies helping them build out their AI infrastructure, and we love it. So, we were super

8:28 excited when we heard that Claude was integrating it directly into their product. At this point, we've touched on tools that help you build faster and also saves you time and money. But, what

8:35 about identifying what's actually worth building in the first place? This goes to tool number five, buildpartner.ai, the tool that I used to find all of these tools in this video. So,

8:45 buildpartner.ai is actually a tool. So, one of my challenges has always been searching the internet and social media for up-to-date content, and specifically, Instagram, Twitter, and

8:54 YouTube. But, within Build Partner, there's a new feature that lets you pull content from these platforms directly from Claude without ever leaving the terminal. So, for example, I could say,

9:03 "Using Build Partner, what are the top free AI tools people are talking about on Twitter?" And I'll go and look directly on Twitter and pull those tweets for me. And this is something

9:11 that Claude normally can't do. And this is really important for me because I've mentioned this on the channel before, but despite making content in this industry every day, the stress that

9:19 comes from trying to keep up with the latest trends is very real, and I know a lot of the people watching this feel that. So, to avoid this, I actually use Build Partner every Friday to give me a

9:28 curated recap of the latest news. And so, this helps me solve a problem that I personally have, and it just makes the quality of my life better. And if you are new to this channel, build

9:37 partner.ai is my tool that I've built and it starts free and then depending on how much you use it, it will eventually cost money. But because you're watching this video, if you use the link below, I

9:46 will 5x the amount of free usage you get because it, I love the YouTube fam. The thing that I want to stress here is find a way to detach yourself from staying up to date with every single new

9:57 announcement. It is just so stressful and this is just a way to solve that problem. Now, getting to free tool number six, which is Obsidian, which is about seeing what Claude is writing and

10:06 I've realized that a lot of people on this channel don't fundamentally understand how this works. So, Obsidian is a glorified file viewer and it is entirely free. And the reason that I

10:14 like it is that I'm constantly having Claude create markdown files that I then want to go in and edit myself. And the best, cheapest, simplest way to read this locally is using a tool called

10:23 Obsidian. And if this is still unclear, just think of this like Apple notes on steroids for your local files. And to help you orchestrate in your tool stack, this is something I use for my local

10:32 files and it doesn't replace what I use for my team, which I personally use Notion for. Obsidian is just a way to iterate on my own machine and read through the files. So, if you're using

10:42 Claude to edit files on your computer, I highly recommend this. To set it up, it's simple, just go to Obsidian, download it and then create a vault, which is just a folder on your machine.

10:50 Tool number seven is Anthropic small business plugin. So, I recently released a whole video about this on my channel, which I will link at the end of this video, but Anthropic has a plugin

11:00 specifically designed for small businesses. And this comes with a whole set of skills across different parts of running a business like grow pipeline for your sales, inbox manager for

11:09 day-to-day operations. And the skills are nice, but that's not really why I like it. A lot of you watching this channel are business owners or operators. And seeing how Anthropic's

11:17 team thinks about using different skills across different lines of business will stimulate your creativity inside your own organization. Yes, if you're on this channel, you know about Claude skills

11:27 and you likely know the basics about it, but it's one of those tools where it's not about knowing, it's about how you actually implement it. And seeing how Anthropic implements it across your

11:35 organization is extremely helpful. Now, I did make a whole video on this, which will be linked at the end of this. But before we get to the final tool, which is probably the one I use the most out

11:43 of all these, you know the drill. This is our anti-slop agreement. Everything in this video is built by humans for humans. And if that's worth something to you, subscribe and help this content

11:52 reach more people. And as a thank you to everyone who supports, you guys really are legends. I love seeing you guys in the comments. I give away a Claude Max subscription as a thank you. So, this

12:01 video's winner is Truth Revealed by SD, who's building a website to extract information from interrogation transcript. I honestly have a couple questions about that. Anyway, to enter

12:12 this video's giveaway, comment which tool I covered here that interests you the most. And the last tool, which is Hex, talk to Claude instead of typing. And if you already use a tool like this,

12:21 pay attention because there's a couple nuances that I don't think you're realizing. Hex is a open-source free alternative to other voice tools like Whisper Flow, and it works anywhere on

12:29 your computer. And so, yes, even if you don't use an external tool within Claude, there is voice mode, which is powerful. But that doesn't help you outside of Claude. So, for me, what I do

12:38 is I have a hot key where I can double-tap control, and I'll start recording my voice, and I'll paste it in whatever app I'm using. So, if you're still typing in Claude or any other

12:46 tool, you're living in 2023, and this is free, and it's just worth a try. Frankly, this has changed how I work so much that I actually have a new problem. I used to love working at coffee shops,

12:56 and now I almost can't because I speak into my computer 99% of the time, and people just start looking funny, and I'm just like, "What are you looking at?" And then I realize that I'm talking to

13:04 an AI, and I get it. But the speed alone is worth it. Now, there are two non-obvious ones that you're likely not considering. The first is this actually helps you think. So, if you've ever

13:13 started talking to someone, and as you talk, you figure out a new concept in your head. That's the power of a stream of consciousness. And by having an audio recording, this allows you to do that.

13:24 And often, I'll have an idea in my head, and then about halfway through, I'll be like, "Oh, wait. I have a new idea that's actually better." And that's what speaking will stimulate. And the second,

13:32 and this is something I guarantee you're not doing, is it also can serve as a speaking coach. So, what it does is it records what you say, and now you actually know how you speak. So, for me,

13:41 I often say, "Like, um I use a lot of filler words." And I can look back historically and see how I'm improving over time. This is a meta point, but the better you can speak, the better you can

13:52 deliver your points to people, and that will impact your ability to provide value in whatever industry you're working in. To download this, it is linked below, and it is very

14:01 straightforward to download. Now, to recap everything we've covered, if you use all these tools, your wins will start stacking. You can spend less with RTK Caveman and Ponytail. You can plan

14:10 better using Lavish, Cloud Code Projects, and Build Partner.ai. And you can learn how Anthropic thinks about skills from their small business plugin. Then, you can just simplify how you work

14:18 by using Obsidian, using Hex so you can speak into it. And then, for payment processing and customer insights, use Wapp, which is also today's video sponsor. And you'll notice that none of

14:27 these are about which model is the smartest. They're about making the way you work with the model that much better. And one thing that I did cover briefly was Anthropic's small business

14:35 plugin, but that's something that deserves a ton of more attention. So, go check that out by clicking right here, where I break down the 13 new skills that were just released in that plugin

14:45 that pair perfectly with everything that I covered today. So, I'll see you over there. Peace.