What we actually recommend, and why
We run a US digital marketing agency. Everything listed here is something we bought with our own money and kept using — hosting, software, hardware, the lot. It is the shortlist we would give a business owner who asked us over coffee: what it is for, who it suits, and what to check before you pay. Nothing is here because a vendor asked.
Disclosure: Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we list or what we say about it. Read the full disclosure.
Browse by category
Each category is a buyer's guide first: the things worth checking before you pay for anything, followed by the specific tools we recommend in it.
Home & Kitchen
Appliances, cookware and the everyday kit worth paying for.
Health & Fitness
Home gym kit, wearables and everyday health supplies.
Fashion & Apparel
Everyday clothing and accessories that hold up to wear.
Electronics & Gadgets
Laptops, monitors, audio and the hardware behind the work.
Web Hosting & Domains
Hosting, domains and the infrastructure a site runs on.
Software & Apps
Tools and platforms billed monthly, yearly or once.
Courses & Learning
Courses, training and books that were worth the money.
Home Office
The furniture and accessories you sit with all day.
The first recommendations are still being written
We would rather publish nothing than publish a list we have not tested. Each tool that appears here will have been used on live client work first, with the write-up covering the cases where it is the wrong choice as well as the cases where it is the right one.
In the meantime, the categories above show what we are working through, and the free tools below need no signup at all.
How we decide what goes on this page
Affiliate pages have a well-earned credibility problem: most of them rank tools by commission and dress it up as a review. We are a working agency rather than a review site, which changes the incentive — we have to keep using these tools on client accounts after the article is published, so recommending something we do not rate would cost us far more than the commission is worth.
So the rule is simple. A tool gets listed only after we have used it on real work. The write-up says plainly who it is wrong for. Where a free option does the job — Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or one of our own 822 free tools — we say so instead of pushing a paid product. And if a tool we recommend gets worse, we take it down rather than quietly leaving the link up.
Where a link earns us a commission, that is stated above the link itself, not buried in a footer. The full terms are on the affiliate disclosure page.
Not sure which tool you actually need?
Half the time the honest answer is that the tool is not the problem. If you would rather have someone look at the whole picture, that is what our 21 digital marketing services are for — or just tell us what you are trying to fix.
