In the past few weeks, I’ve read three articles titled The Best AI Tools for Businesses. All three had something in common: affiliate links. Lots of them. The recommendations were predictable — ChatGPT, Jasper, Notion AI, HubSpot, Salesforce Einstein. Tools that sound like someone Googled “AI tool enterprise” and slapped a commission on top.
Nothing against these tools. Some of them are good. But when I look at what we at Exasync actually use every day — a company with one founder and 50 AI agents that has been running productively since November 2025 — the reality looks completely different.
So here’s our real tool list. 15 tools that we pay for, use daily, and without which the operation wouldn’t run. With real prices, honest ratings, and the occasional tool we tested and then dropped.
Most AI tools for businesses lists have a problem: They’re written by people who don’t use the tools. They aggregate features from landing pages, read reviews, and rewrite the whole thing. You can tell because every tool is described as “powerful,” “intuitive,” and “scalable.” Three adjectives that mean nothing.
Our perspective is different. Exasync is an AI company that runs itself 95 percent on AI. 50 agents — from Atlas (CEO) to Hermes (COO) to Daedalus (Dev Lead) — work daily on marketing, development, finance, and operations. This means: Every tool in our stack has to work. Not theoretically, not in demo mode, but under real load, every day, often without a human watching.
What you get here: real monthly costs (as of April 2026), an honest rating on a scale of 1 to 5, and for each tool an alternative in case it’s a better fit for your situation.
Here’s the complete overview. After that, I’ll go into each tool individually.
Claude (Anthropic): Primary AI model for all 50 agents. Cost: EUR 200–500/month. Rating: 5/5. Alternative: GPT-4o, Gemini Pro.
n8n: Workflow automation. Cost: EUR 0–20/month. Rating: 5/5. Alternative: Make.com, Zapier.
Supabase: Database, auth, edge functions, storage. Cost: USD 0–25/month. Rating: 5/5. Alternative: Firebase, PlanetScale.
Webflow: Website, CMS, blog, landing pages. Cost: ~USD 39/month. Rating: 4/5. Alternative: WordPress, Framer.
GitHub: Code, CI/CD, GitHub Pages hosting. Cost: ~USD 4/month. Rating: 5/5. Alternative: GitLab.
Make.com: Visual automation (client projects). Cost: from EUR 9/month. Rating: 3/5. Alternative: n8n, Zapier.
Power Automate: Desktop RPA for legacy software. Cost: Included in M365. Rating: 3/5. Alternative: UiPath, Automation Anywhere.
Playwright: Browser automation and testing. Cost: EUR 0 (open source). Rating: 4/5. Alternative: Puppeteer, Selenium.
ComfyUI + Flux: Local AI image generation. Cost: ~EUR 0 (electricity). Rating: 4/5. Alternative: Midjourney, DALL-E 3.
Resend: Transactional email API. Cost: EUR 0 (free tier). Rating: 4/5. Alternative: SendGrid, Postmark.
Stripe: Payment links, invoicing. Cost: Transaction fees only. Rating: 5/5. Alternative: Mollie, Paddle.
Google Search Console: SEO monitoring, indexing. Cost: EUR 0. Rating: 4/5. Alternative: Ahrefs (paid).
Strato SMTP: Email sending (company domains). Cost: ~EUR 5/month. Rating: 3/5. Alternative: M365 Exchange, Fastmail.
Monday.com: Project management (client projects). Cost: from EUR 8/user. Rating: 3/5. Alternative: Linear, Asana, Notion.
VS Code + Claude Code: Development environment with AI integration. Cost: EUR 0. Rating: 5/5. Alternative: Cursor, Windsurf.
Total monthly cost: EUR 350–600. That’s the complete tech stack of an AI company with 50 agents, a live website, automated workflows, and real-time monitoring. For comparison: A single Salesforce seat costs more.
Claude is the heart of Exasync. All 50 agents run on Claude models. The breakdown: Opus for strategic decisions and complex analysis (Atlas, Hermes, Hephaestus, Prometheus), Sonnet for the execution layer (marketing, sales, development), Haiku for simple repetitive tasks. Monthly costs fluctuate considerably — in intensive months with many parallel agent sessions, we hit the EUR 500 mark, in normal operation we’re around EUR 250.
Why not GPT-4o or Gemini? We tested both. Claude delivers consistently better results on long, coherent tasks — and that’s exactly what agents need. Context window utilization is more precise, instruction adherence is higher. For short individual questions, the difference is marginal. But when an agent needs to work through a complex workflow for 45 minutes, you notice the difference immediately.
n8n is our automation control center. We run a self-hosted instance (free) for internal workflows and use the cloud version for quick prototypes and client demos. Why n8n instead of Zapier? Three reasons: Self-hosting possible, no vendor lock-in, and the community nodes cover almost everything.
Specifically, we run through n8n: webhook reception from the website, lead routing to Supabase, content calendar triggers, monitoring alerts, and the connection between different agent systems. The learning curve is steeper than Zapier’s, but after two weeks you build workflows three times faster. For a detailed comparison of n8n against Make.com and Zapier: We’ve done that in depth.
Supabase is the database behind everything. Agent status, task queue, worker registry, content calendar, lead management — it all runs there. Plus edge functions, realtime subscriptions, and storage. The free tier is enough to start; we’re on Pro (USD 25/month) for higher limits. Why not Firebase? PostgreSQL instead of NoSQL, real SQL, row-level security without backend middleware. Clear decision.
Webflow hosts exasync.ai. Clean HTML, fast load times, solid SEO. Why only 4 out of 5? The API has an annoying limitation: The German-language main version can’t be edited via API, only in the visual designer. We work around this with Playwright, but it’s not elegant. USD 39/month for CMS, custom code, and CDN. For purely content-driven sites, Framer would be an alternative today with a more modern editor experience.
Every piece of code, every configuration, every workflow lives on GitHub. Pro plan at USD 4/month gives us private repos, extended Actions minutes, and GitHub Pages as free hosting. Our OrgSphere dashboard (3D visualization of all 50 agents) runs entirely on GitHub Pages. No server, no hosting costs, automatic deployment on every push. For a small company, that’s unbeatable.
Honestly: We use Make.com mainly for client projects, not for ourselves. The reason is simple — clients know it, the visual interface is accessible, and it can be quickly demonstrated. Internally, we prefer n8n because we have more control there. The price (from EUR 9/month) is fair, reliability is good. But the rate limits on cheaper plans are annoying, and debugging complex scenarios is more cumbersome than with n8n.
Our tool for legacy software without APIs: simulating clicks, filling forms, extracting data from SAP. It works, but it’s clunky. The recording feature produces fragile flows that break with every UI update. Included in M365, so no extra costs. For legacy integration in the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s still without alternative.
Open-source browser automation from Microsoft. Two use cases for us: automated testing and browser control where APIs are missing (such as operating the Webflow Designer). Free, excellent documentation. Only downside: requires developer knowledge. Not for non-technical users.
Our hidden gem: local image generation with Flux1-dev on an RTX 4080 Super. Social media graphics, blog headers, branding images — all local, cost per image: EUR 0.0004 in electricity. We even trained a LoRA model on me for consistent avatar images. Downside: You need a GPU and technical setup. For teams without hardware: Midjourney or Leonardo AI.
Email API for transactional emails. 100 emails/day free, elegant API, delivery rate above 98 percent. Not 5/5 because the jump from the free tier to the next level for newsletters is too big.
No fixed costs, only transaction fees (1.5% + EUR 0.25 in the EU). Payment links, billing portal, webhook integration with Supabase in two hours. For a young company without an accounting team, it’s gold.
Free, indispensable. Agent Pheme checks indexing, click rates, and rankings weekly. Drawback: Data lags 2–3 days behind. For deeper analyses, you need Ahrefs or Semrush. But as baseline monitoring, it’s perfectly sufficient.
SMTP relay for company domains, EUR 5/month. The webmail interface is from 2015, IMAP is mediocre, support is slow. For pure SMTP sending it’s solid — at this price, you don’t complain loudly.
We use it exclusively in our partnership with UXUIX. It’s the partner’s tool, so we use it along. Internally, everything runs through Supabase: cheaper, more flexible, better integrated into our stack. EUR 8 per user adds up quickly.
VS Code as an editor needs no explanation. What makes the difference: Claude Code as an extension. It connects Claude directly with the editor — our agent Daedalus (Dev Lead) works with it. Writing code, reviewing, refactoring, generating tests, creating documentation — all in one window. On top of that, Claude Code can connect MCP servers (Model Context Protocol): Supabase, Webflow, Playwright, memory systems. Our entire agent stack is orchestrated from within VS Code. Free. And yes, this article was written with exactly this setup.
Not every tool survives the real-world test. Three examples from our graveyard:
Zapier. We tested Zapier alongside n8n for four months. Result: For simple two-step automations, Zapier is faster to set up. But for anything beyond “if X, then Y,” you hit walls. Loops, error handling, data manipulation — all cumbersome. And the price: USD 29/month for the cheapest paid plan, capped at 750 tasks/month. n8n: Self-hosted, unlimited, free. Decision: dropped.
Notion AI. Sounds perfect in theory — knowledge base with built-in AI. In practice, the AI function was too superficial for our needs. Summaries and simple queries work, but complex tasks like “analyze all open tasks and create a prioritization proposal” produced unusable results. Also: Our agents need API access to data — Notion’s API is good for simple CRUD operations but too slow for real-time queries. We switched entirely to Supabase and saved EUR 10/month.
Midjourney (as primary tool). Midjourney produces impressive images. No question. But for an AI company that wants to generate images programmatically, it has a fundamental drawback: It runs through Discord. No proper API access, no batch processing, no programmatic workflow. We switched to ComfyUI + Flux: local control, API-capable, no ongoing costs. Midjourney remains as a source of inspiration — but production runs locally.
Transparency is important, so here’s the real monthly bill:
AI models: Claude API (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) — EUR 200–500/month
Automation: n8n Cloud, Make.com — EUR 20–30/month
Database & backend: Supabase Pro — ~USD 25/month
Website & CMS: Webflow Business — ~USD 39/month
Code & hosting: GitHub Pro — ~USD 4/month
Email: Strato SMTP, Resend (free) — ~EUR 5/month
Payments: Stripe (transaction-based) — variable
Project management: Monday.com (1 user) — ~EUR 8/month
Free tools: Playwright, ComfyUI, GSC, VS Code — EUR 0
Total monthly cost: EUR 350–600. Biggest item: Claude API. Everything else combined under EUR 120. A single employee in Germany costs EUR 4,500–6,000/month. The complete tech stack less than a tenth of that. Not a fair comparison — but proof of the capital efficiency of a modern AI stack.
Not every company needs 15 tools. If you want to start tomorrow working with AI for your business, five tools are enough. Budget: under EUR 100 per month.
Claude Pro: AI assistant for texts, analyses, code — ~USD 20/month
n8n Cloud Starter: First automations (emails, notifications) — ~EUR 20/month
Supabase Free: Database, auth, simple backend logic — EUR 0
GitHub Free: Code management, Pages hosting — EUR 0
Google Search Console: SEO monitoring — EUR 0
Monthly cost: ~EUR 40. That gives you AI assistant, automation, database, hosting, and SEO monitoring covered. That’s enough for 80 percent of what a small business needs to get started. Next step: Webflow for the website (from USD 14–39) and Stripe for payments (no fixed costs). Under EUR 100, serious stack.
After 18 months of intensive tool usage (and some expensive bad decisions), four principles have crystallized:
1. API access is non-negotiable. Every tool in our stack has an API. Why? Because AI agents don’t click on user interfaces — they need programmatic access. A tool without an API is a silo. And silos are the death of any automation.
2. Free tiers aren’t a savings strategy, they’re a testing ground. We start every new tool on the free tier. If it’s in daily use after four weeks, we upgrade. If not, it’s out. This rule has saved us more money than any negotiation over enterprise discounts.
3. Prefer open source where possible. n8n over Zapier. Playwright over Browserstack. ComfyUI over Midjourney. Not for ideological reasons, but because open-source tools give us more control. If the provider triples their prices tomorrow (happens regularly), we can keep going.
4. Fewer tools, deeper integration. Better five tools that work perfectly together than 20 that exist side by side. Our stack is deliberately small. Each tool has exactly one purpose, and the integration between tools (Supabase as the central data hub, n8n as the connection layer) is what makes the stack powerful — not the number of tools.
One more thing that’s important to me: This article contains no affiliate links. Not a single one. We earn nothing from whether you use n8n, Supabase, or Claude. That’s the difference between a recommendation and an advertisement.
The stack is never finished. We’re currently evaluating Dify (open-source agent orchestration), Cal.com (open-source appointment scheduling), and Tinybird (real-time analytics). What we definitely won’t adopt: Tools without APIs, tools that use our data as training data, and tools with opaque pricing.
If you want to see how 50 AI agents collaborate on this stack: Our OrgSphere dashboard shows that in real time. And if you’d like to know whether an AI chatbot for your company could run on a similar stack — let’s talk. No slides, no affiliate links. Just an honest assessment.
