Thinking and writing
claude.
The tool I use for nearly everything, and the one I trust most.
Claude at a glance
I pay for this
- Best for
- Owners who want one tool doing five jobs, and who will spend twenty minutes setting it up.
- Skip it if
- You mainly need image generation, or you want copy that sounds exactly like you straight out of the box.
- Pricing
- Free tier. Paid from about $20/month.
Is Claude worth it?
What do I use Claude for?
Nearly everything.
Slides, replies to email, social drafts, research, reading sentiment off social sites, building websites. This page started as a voice note into Claude.
Two things it doesn’t do well for me. The images aren’t good enough for my brand. And its first pass at my writing voice lands close but stiff: right ideas, wrong music.
Which feature would I miss most?
Voice recording.
I talk faster than I type and I think better out loud, so most of what I make starts as a voice note instead of a blank page.
It works cleanly on my phone and my Mac. On my PC it gets clunky and I’ve never worked out why. Wispr Flow fixed that. It types wherever your cursor already is, so it works in Claude and everywhere else on the machine.
Who is Claude for, and who should skip it?
Owners who want one tool, not five.
There’s a second reason I keep it at the center. Of the nine AI companies the Future of Life Institute graded this summer, Anthropic came out on top. Right now it’s the most responsible of the bunch, and that matters to me. xAI, DeepSeek and Mistral scored F’s, which is why I don’t use Grok.
Skip Claude if what you need is image generation, or finished copy in your voice with no editing pass.
How have I used Claude recently?
This page.
I answered six questions as a voice note, handed the transcript to Claude, and it drafted the page you’re reading. It also fact-checked my claim about Anthropic and corrected me, which is how the ranking above ended up more precise than the sentence I recorded.
What do I wish I had known about Claude on day one?
Fill in your instructions first.
There are three places standing instructions live, and most people fill in none of them:
- Account level. Context about you and your business that applies to every conversation.
- Project level. Instructions scoped to one body of work, so a client project doesn’t drag in context from an unrelated one.
- Skills and connected folders. Reference material Claude reads when the task calls for it.
Put today’s date in your account-level instructions and update it now and then. It sounds trivial. It changes how the model reasons about what’s current.
Twenty minutes here saves you re-explaining your business at the start of every conversation.
How does Claude fit with my other tools?
Claude drafts. Then I run it through ChatGPT.
Claude gets the draft mostly right but stiff. It goes to ChatGPT for a voice pass, because ChatGPT is better at making it sound like a person wrote it.
The rest is connectors. Claude reaches into Google Drive, Canva, Gmail and Asana directly, so the work happens where the work already lives instead of in a tab I copy things out of. That’s the part that changed it for me. I’m not moving things between tabs all day anymore.
Would I pay for Claude?
Yes. Absolutely.
The $20 a month plan handles most people. If you’re moving your whole business onto it, the way I have, you may need to step up to Max.
Anthropic changes plans more often than I update this page, so check Claude’s current pricing before you decide.
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