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My Main Tools
(+ how to get them without dumping money down the toilet)
Figured with the site’s debut, I should start off with my copywriting tech stack. Because why not?
My Design Tech Stack
For design, I mainly use Canva (pro is $16/mo), Freepik ($39/mo) and Unsplash (plus version is $16/mo).
Canva is super intuitive and has basically everything you’d need for basic design, with a multitude of templates. With their newer AI capabilities it also makes designing ads go much faster.
Sure you could use something like Photoshop, but I generally find it to be a bit overkill, and Canva definitely has templates catered towards copywriting.
Freepik is a no brainer. AI photos are fast and where its at, they will only get better and better.
Also it’s got a bunch of other tools besides AI photos:
AI massively expands the horizons for how crazy you can get with photos. And crazy photos grab attention.
There are times when using real photos are helpful and that’s where I use Unsplash.
Although, I generally just use it for reference photos. If you want high quality AI photos, you need to feed the AI high quality photos. It WILL make the output 100x better. Trust. (That donkey is real btw)
Obviously if you work with a team (and you only write copy), design tools are less important but if you are flying solo, they are crucial.
My AI Writing Tech Stack
People like to choose one AI pretend it’s holy, but I can assure you, it is not. They all have different use cases and strengths. ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. Manus. I use them all.
BUT, basically, when you’re using AI to help you with copywriting, you are looking for three things: (1) its ability to quickly iterate, (2) its ability to understand context, and (3) its ability to understand good copywriting.
At this point, it simply cannot understand a client’s audience like you can and it can’t write perfect copy. But you are looking for an AI that can get pretty darn close.
For now, AI generates ideas, you refine.
Whatever AI fits the bill, you use.
Basically all AIs cover point 1 (quick iteration), so where they’re truly tested is in points 2 and 3 (understanding context and understanding good copywriting).
I’ve been using Manus a lot recently for this exact reason. It handles large context well and has a full file system within a sandbox.
You can give it pages of data on products, you can give it samples of your writing, you can give it images of your favorite design style. And we’re not talking about a couple files, we’re talking about HUNDREDS (at least in the pro version).
As of now this is pretty unique and very valuable.
Among many things, this is useful for any type of research (on the market, products, etc.), especially now that they are partnered with Similarweb. This allows you to research market data, competitor strategies, web traffic, etc. WITHIN Manus. Very, very exciting and way faster than traditional research.
Even so, it’s hard to recommend one AI tool, because the truth is next week something else would outperform it, so it’s important to constantly be pushing these AIs to their limits (for YOUR use cases) and learning about them (which I will conveniently be writing about).
Cost
One thing that I’d note if you are just starting out is that paying for all these tools gets real expensive real fast. You could easily be paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a month for them and while they do help you produce better work faster, you won’t be able to do so for much longer if you bankrupt yourself paying for AI tools.
Start with the free versions to dip your toes in the water, but those are often pretty limiting.
The other day a dude I was DMing with told me about a tool sharing subscription he uses. Basically they pay for thousands of dollars of subscriptions and share all the accounts with the subscribers. It looks like most of what I mentioned above are on it plus basically anything else you’d want. It even has Brain.fm, if that’s your thing.
It’s about $30/month which is an insane deal for all the tools you’re getting. Haven’t used it myself, but there’s 4500+ users and almost 400 five star reviews, so it looks like a viable option till you start printing. They are shared accounts, but if you’re tight on cash it’s something you could check out (here).
Because it includes so many tools you can easily try out which ones you work with best. The more you can test tools the better.
Like how you test copy, test tools as fast as possible and build your own copywriting tech stack. Once you have the tools you like, then it would make more sense to pay for private accounts.
– THE COPYWRITER