Look at that for a second. Eighty-something tools, eleven categories, more if you count the duplicates across the columns. Someone made it, somebody screenshotted it, somebody else reposted it to Reddit, and now it sits in fifteen different small business owner's bookmarks as "AI stuff I should probably get around to."
That is the wrong shape for the problem.
The grid is not a curated list. It is a vibe.
Half the names on that chart are typos. Grammrrly. Tabni. Snork. Codegeex. Jotson. Showwave. N8h. Sora appears twice. Calendy is listed beside Calendly like they are different things. Deckplot shows up under three different categories. This was not researched. It was either AI-generated or scraped from somewhere and never fact-checked. The reason it gets ten thousand upvotes on Reddit is the visual density, not the accuracy.
That alone is the tell. If the chart were curated by somebody who used these tools, the names would be right. They are not. So it is not a recommendation engine. It is a feeling. The feeling is "look at how much there is, you should be doing more, here is everything, where do I start, do I have FOMO yet, yes I have FOMO."
Then somebody small-business-shaped looks at it and thinks they need to be doing 80 things. They are already doing one thing. The one thing is running their actual business. The 80 things are not the business.
What the grid is actually selling
Every one of those tools is a SaaS subscription. Every one of those subscriptions is between fifteen and eighty dollars a month. Most of them have a free tier that converts you in 14 days. If you act on this grid the way it wants you to, here is what next year looks like:
Three writing tools you used twice. Two scheduling tools fighting each other for your calendar. A meeting transcription service for a meeting type you have once a month. An image generator you forgot to cancel. A workflow automator that handles one Zap. A graphic design tool that crashes on your laptop. Two presentation makers. Spreadsheet AI you tried once. Sometime in April you do the math and realize you are paying $3,200 a year for software you barely use, and the work you actually wanted help with, the email triage and the follow-ups and the new-client onboarding and the invoice chasing, is still on your plate.
This is the world the grid is selling. Not productivity. Subscription density.
What I actually run instead
I built Obsidian AI Labs because I lived through the version of this shopping list and got out the other side. I cut fourteen SaaS tools in one year. They got replaced with one AI stack on a server I control. The stack does the work of most of the categories in that grid. Specifically:
Writing tools. The blog you are reading was drafted by an agent reading my voice notes, polished by another agent that knows my style from years of my sent emails, then read end to end by me. Nobody paid Copy.Ai or Jasper. The cost was a few cents of API calls.
Scheduling tools. I do not use Reclaim or Motion or any of the AI calendar things. My calendar gets dual-written to my work Google calendar and my personal iCloud in the same script. If somebody asks me when I am free, the agent answers from the same source of truth I use.
Meeting notes. I do not use Fireflies or Otter. My agent gets a Telegram voice message from me and runs it through Whisper. The transcript lands in my knowledge base. It is twenty cents.
Image generation. The hero images on every blog post on this site are generated through one API. I do not subscribe to Midjourney or Adobe Firefly. The cost is a quarter per image.
Workflow automation. I do not use Zapier or Make or n8n. The same agent that reads my email writes to my CRM and books the follow-ups. It is one stack, not a chain of services with their own dashboards and their own pricing tiers.
Graphic design. I do not use Flourish or Thinkmaps. When I need a chart for a blog post, my agent renders it.
Meeting transcription, knowledge management, video generation, presentation building. All of it is shaped the same way. One stack, a few hundred dollars a month in compute, no third-party data warehouses, no subscription rot.
The grid is the problem the customer brings me
Most of the conversations I have with small business owners go like this. They show me their browser bookmark bar. They are paying for nine tools. Six of them are AI tools added in the last twelve months. Two of them they have forgotten to log into for three months. None of them are talking to each other. The customer thinks the answer to their problem is another tool on the chart. The actual answer is a small private AI stack that does the work of the other nine.
So when somebody sends me an image like that and asks if I should add some of these to what we run at Obsidian AI Labs, the honest answer is no. Doing that would be the opposite of what we sell. We sell people getting out of that grid, not us climbing further into it.
If a row catches your eye, that is a real signal
I want to be honest about the one caveat. Some of those tools are excellent. Some are the right answer for a specific job. If you look at that chart and a specific row jumps out at you because you have a real, named problem you cannot solve any other way, that is signal worth listening to. The trap is not any single tool on the grid. The trap is the shopping posture. Browsing eighty tools looking for one that will fix your business is what you do at three in the morning when you cannot sleep. Picking up one tool because you have a specific named problem you cannot otherwise solve is what an adult does.
If you find yourself doing the first thing, the answer is probably not the chart. The answer is probably a quiet conversation with somebody who builds plumbing, not somebody who sells a row.