Best AI Free Tools For Your Business In 2026
Discover the best AI-free or inexpensive tools for 2026 for your WordPress membership website. Save money while boosting productivity with our expert-tested recommendations.
#1 – NoteBook LM
Prices Free | $29 per month
#2 – Google Pomelli
https://labs.google.com/pomelli/about
Prices Free
#3 – Genspark AI
Prices Free | Plus $19.99 | Pro $199.99 per month
#4 – Openart.ai
Prices Essential $14 | Advanced $29 | Infinite $56 | Wonder $240 per month
Nano Banana
https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation
Prices Free | Basic $9.99 | Pro $29.99
#5 – Gamma
Prices Free | Plus $10 | Pro $25 | Ultra $100 per month
#6 – SupperWhisper
Prices Free | Pro $8.49 | month or Yearly Pro $89.99 | Lifetime $249.99
#7 – WordPress AI Web Site Membership Builders
Kadence WP
Prices Free | Express $69 | Plus $169 | Ultimate #299 per year
ZipWP
Prices Free | Hobby $99 | Pro $16.99 | Business $26.99
#8 – Recall
Prices Free | Plus $10 per month
#9 – Imagine AI
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
00:00:15.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 154. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about some of the best AI-free or inexpensive tools that have come on my radar and Kirk’s radar. Should be a great show. Almost all the stuff here I’ve used quite extensively. Some of it I’ve done a reasonably good review on, and I’m using it at the present moment. Got my great co-host with me. Kirk, would you like to quickly introduce yourself?
[00:01:08.660] Kurt von Ahnen
Absolutely, Jonathan. My name is Kirk von Annen. I own an agency called Manana No Mas, and we work directly with the great folks over at WP Tonic.
[00:01:16.760] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Kirk, before we go into it, folks, I think we got a message from one of our major sponsors. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. Coming back, folks. Also, we wanted to take the opportunity to say that we got a fantastic free course, actually done by Kirk himself. That shows you how to build your membership community website from start to finish using some of the best WordPress technologies. You can get it for half price. That’s around $25. You can get it by going over to WP-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. And you find the course there, plus a load of Special Offers from the Sponsors. What more could you ask for? So, Kurt, let’s go straight into it. So when I sent you these tools and that, what were your initial thoughts?
[00:02:30.300] Kurt von Ahnen
Well, my initial thoughts were, my goodness, Jonathan’s done it again. He’s managed to come up with a couple of things I’ve never heard of. So I went ahead, and I checked them out.
[00:02:40.940] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m good at wasting your time.
[00:02:44.680] Kurt von Ahnen
I did due diligence and all that; I checked with you. And I’ll just say it, I am not a big fan of Google in general, but they’ve really knocked it out of the park with a couple of decent tools. And I mean, the Notebook LM is sweet. And then you sent me that Pamela, and I jumped in. I gave it a shot, gave it a whirl, took it for a test drive. I think for people in the AI startup, getting an entry-level AI space. These are great tools.
[00:03:21.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think a lot of the stuff we’re going to be discussing in this episode has some real value. A lot of them, not all of them, a lot of them have really functioning free plans, or they’re very cost-effective if they don’t have a free plan. Let’s start with one I’m using a lot now: the Google Notebook LLM. They do a free level. I’m just using the free level. It does some really good research. You can put in PDFs, website URLs, Word documents, all sorts of documents, and online resources about a particular subject. It will go out, summarize it all, and create a really fantastic website. The main thing I’ve been using it for is producing more content for my blog pages and the WP Tonic website. One of the things it does after I’ve written a blog post, laid it all out, and published it is go into Notebook L and M and say, “Produce an audio summary.” It goes off and gives an audio summary. It’s normally a man and a woman talking about the subject.
[00:04:56.560] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got to be truthful, I’m a bit peeved because I think they do a better job than I do at podcasting, but it’s without the humor. But on the other hand, I think the audio quality and the discussion are quite impressive, and you really can’t tell that it’s AI-generated, in all honesty. They also do info images as well. They’re not bad. I use them. I think if you spent money on artists, you could do a better job. But being that it’s free, it does a pretty good job. It also offers short videos that summarize the subject. They’re not bad either. I don’t think they’re quite up to the audio quality, because some of the images they use aren’t terrible. But in total, I think it’s a very impressive tool for what you can do. What are your feelings, Kurt?
[00:06:08.680] Kurt von Ahnen
Well, part of the reason I like Notebook LM is the way you described it up front: you limit what it uses for content. All too often, I’m a fan of Grok for AI, so I’ll use Groc or sometimes OpenAI or Claude or something. And you go out to get stuff. It just goes and searches willy-nilly and then comes back with some hallucinated answer or something. And you’ve got to really use a gift of discernment to figure out, is this real? Is this fake? Is it genuine? Is it up to date? And when you use Notebook LM, you can restrict where its content is sent. And that’s what I really, really like about it. If you have a project that has a ton of documentation, it’s a super handy tool. For instance, I work directly with the folks at Lifter LMS, and they have an incredible document library of just an unbelievably complete document library with videos and everything. And you can use Notebook LM to restrict that. And when I say ‘restrict,’ I mean it should use only that content for my answers. And so when I’m doing customer service help or stuff like that with Lifter LMS stuff, it really helps isolate the source of the answer and lets me know that I have the correct information.
[00:07:36.840] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Have you been using it yourself, then?
[00:07:41.720] Kurt von Ahnen
I do. Yeah, in that instance, for sure. Where I find a struggle with Notebook LM, and quite honestly, this is going to happen with lots of startup companies or people that are new to entry-level AI users, is that usually, you don’t have enough content. I’ve run an analysis, and this happens with every company: we need an AI chatbot. And I go, well, what are you going to train the AI chatbot on? Because you need to have content to train these things. And so if you have a small company, you don’t have a lot of documentation, and you let your chatbot train on the open Internet, well, it’s going to give your clients and customers answers from the open Internet. And that’s what you don’t want. So you need enough content. And that’s the stumbling block for Notebook LM in my mind: you want to make sure you give it enough information to feed on, but not be unrestricted access to the whole open internet. And I think it works really well.
[00:08:41.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Right. Let’s go to Google Pommeli. Yeah, fun one. So what did you think of this one? You do lead. Oh, by the way, I’m sorry, Kurt. Notebook LM is free. They’ve got a paid version that’s around $29. If you’ve got certain Google accounts, Gemini, I think you get the pro version as part of the package. In that, I expect it’s not that clear, which is very typical of Google. Sorry to interrupt there. I apologize.
[00:09:21.770] Kurt von Ahnen
Totally fine. This Pameli thing is interesting. Again, something I never heard of until today’s show, doing the research prior to the It tells you right up front what it is. It has an introductory video and it says, Hey, get started. Add your URL here, and we will scrape your URL and come up with the visual DNA of your business. And not for nothing, I think just doing the exercise is a good exercise because how many people are completely inconsistent in their branding or how they represent themselves, especially small companies. And And so I put the Manana Nomas URL in. I said, go ahead, go to town. It said this will take up to five minutes. In less than two minutes, it said, here’s your DNA. So here’s your fonts, here’s your color swatches. If you’ve ever had a marketing company create a mood board for you. Have you ever heard of what a mood board is? This website created the mood board for Manana Nomas in less than two minutes. And so it is my fonts, my colors, my main ideas, my main art and focus, my brand logo is there. I mean, it’s not a complete style guide, but it is a pretty accurate mood board based on my existing website.
[00:10:46.340] Kurt von Ahnen
So then the next step is create campaigns. So you just click it and it says create campaigns, and it uses the information off your website to try and give you, to spark your marketing brain, to give you just some ideas on How would you promote this business? And it gives you visuals to do it. And then you can go through the process, if you want, of editing that or adding your own creative elements or things like that. But it gives you ideas. So in my instance, I had a YouTube-looking thumbnail that says E-Learning for enterprise Businesses. Bam, right? Because we’re an E-Learning agency. But it takes that and it puts it into a campaign that says, LMS cost overruns question mark, fixed. So it’s basically turns it into this giant lead image that you could use elsewhere. I think it does a really good job. Does it replace a marketing person? Does it replace a marketing department in a company? No, I don’t think it does. But I think it’s a really good tool, especially for smaller companies, to double-check the consistency in their branding and their messaging. I think it’s a really good tool for that.
[00:11:57.800] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s part of the Google It’s things that they haven’t totally released to public. It’s more like public beta. But I thought you did a really good summary there, but I think it does a really good job I have put WP tonic in, but I need to do it again and spend the time looking at what they have found. The nice thing about the The graphics it produces, they do provide an editor where you can change things, change the fonts, change the images. Pardon?
[00:12:40.380] Kurt von Ahnen
On each of those pages, I don’t know if you found this or not, Jonathan, but on each of those pages, there’s a drop down carat that’ll say, campaigns is where you’re working, right? So maybe you’re on the campaigns page and it says campaigns, but directly underneath campaigns, it’ll say business DNA with a drop down. And when you drop that down, it opens up a design card like that mood board I was talking about. And so it gives you font choices, your color swatches, if you need those HTML color, what do they call those? Hex codes, fonts and logo again. So it’s always at the ready for You. So when it’s creating those campaigns, creating those assets that Jonathan just talked about, you can always drop down your business DNA and match it up and go, Oh, is it using the right colors? Okay, yeah, it It’s following its own guideline.
[00:13:33.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and it’s free, folks. You can’t complain. We can, but it’s free. Genspark AI. This is the Swiss Army knife of AI, really. Obviously, you got the four main players. You got Open AI, you’ve got Claude, you He got Gemini, and you got Perplexity. They’re the main four. There’s a number of other players, but they’re the main four. But with Genspark AI, you have access to all four, and it does a lot of things. And the free version isn’t crippled. So the average person hit a token limit straight away. It’s pretty generous. The next level up is around just under $19, but there’s a big jump between the plus, which is not around $19, just under $20. It goes up to the pro. They want a couple of hundred dollars. But you find that with most of these, the four that I mentioned, they do a three, they do a 20, and then they do a commercial version, which is normally around a couple of hundred dollars. But for what you get, for what it can do, it’s quite impressive. What’s your thoughts about this one?
[00:15:12.560] Kurt von Ahnen
I hear a lot of hype about Gen Spark. The people that use it really, really seem to love it. I’ve seen a lot of content. And, broadly enough, I’ve seen some AI slop come from it, too. It ends up on the X feed. But my understanding is that it works extremely well and It is a good value for what it provides. I am not personally a Gen Spark user myself, but I know it to be very, very capable, and I have clients that use it that love it.
[00:15:41.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it’s good value. I haven’t used it that extensively because especially around thumbnails and imaging, which we’re going to discuss in a minute, I think especially photorealistic imaging, I find all these. I think if you’re talking about sketching, cartoons, non-realistic photos, I think a lot of these photo image AI can be effective. But when it comes to photorealistic imaging, you can really waste a lot of time. I use Canva, but I did utilize a program, but I forgot his name, a service. I had about half a dozen professionally taken photos of myself. You could upload these six photos into the service, and it would produce between 50 and 100 AI generated images of you. It took a couple of hours because you had to reload up the photos, blah, blah, blah. But it did, in the in the end work, and it generated over 50 to 100 different images of myself, headshots, and I just swap them out with the thumbnails that I’m doing. But I think in producing thumbnails, I haven’t come across anything that really does it that effectively and quickly rather than the system that I’m using. What would you respond to what I’ve just I was trying to think of what that company was that made that we did all those head shots with the Lifter LMS team.
[00:17:39.980] Kurt von Ahnen
It was really fun because you could be like, make me from Star Trek or make me from whatever. And yet, like Jonathan said, you’d upload some head shots and then it would generate these cartoonish head shots of you that were fun. Super, super fun. As far as images and thumbnails and stuff go, Jonathan, instead of looking at a Gen Spark thing, I do. I hang out in Canva quite a bit because it’s so direct and so easy. And then the thing that, and I know that I’ve mentioned this before, it’s my own stupidity, but I’m locked in to the Adobe Creative Suite. And so I have Adobe Creative Cloud and the AI powers in Adobe Creative Cloud for that type of thing with the thumbnails and modifying headshots and stuff. It just works really, really well.
[00:18:30.870] – Jonathan Denwood
It does. It does produce pretty good quality, does it?
[00:18:33.300] Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. I hate to be the poopoo guy, but when something like Genspark comes along, I go, Well, I already got tools to do this. And then I think there comes a certain comfort level with familiarity with these things that… I mean, I’m not looking to jump into every new thing, if that makes sense. I just wasn’t awestruck by… Like I said, I have friends that use it. I have customers that use it. They all seem to love it. It just wasn’t It’s an attractive to me at the moment.
[00:19:01.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m in a similar spot. Also with Adobe, you got Adobe Express, which is their cloud base, which is free or you have to pay for a higher version. I think I have to look at that because I’ve been told it’s got some good thumbnail-producing functionality there as well. It works very well. Right. Now, I’m talking about… Now, there’s two. I added one. I added Nerobanana, nano-banana.
[00:19:41.860] Kurt von Ahnen
Nerobanana.
[00:19:43.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Which is extremely powerful, but you can also waste a lot of time. But I would say at the present moment of the AI systems, it is recognized when it comes to producing imaging images. It is the most powerful. Now, I came across one called Open Art AI. Now, this is not for the faint of heart. This is not something that… Don’t expect to produce something really fantastic in a minute. But I’ve watched some tutorials on that, and when it comes to video and realistic video and producing virtual AI representations of yourself and lip in your lips and producing characters, you can produce small films and you can take your image, import it and put it into very… And it will then scan it and then put the figure into various positions, and then you can turn that character into a character for a video. And when it comes to the realistic quality imaging, which I say a lot of the other LLMNs aren’t so quite good at. It is very impressive, like I say, but it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s not something you are going to have to watch some YouTube video videos and you’re going to have to spend a few hours with it.
[00:21:33.440] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you reckon on what I’ve been saying about this?
[00:21:37.440] Kurt von Ahnen
I equate it to almost like a saura. You’re right. You can absolutely Take an image of yourself. It maps it. You can make live-action video with it. Course creators. So the use case for course creators is good for this one because some people just don’t like to be on camera or They’re not good at speaking on camera, so they can write the script and then have this thing actually generate learning content using them as the focal visual, right? But it’s just from a picture that becomes a video. I’ll be honest, all this stuff creeps me out, Jonathan. This is more than I want my AI to do. It’s cool that it does it, but it’s more than I’m looking for.
[00:22:30.640] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got similar feelings about it. They don’t offer a free plan, but it’s not that expensive, folks, for what you can do. The essential starts at 40, and they got to advance at 29, infinity 56. Then they got their last plan, which they call WNDYR, which is $2. 40 per month. It’s not outrageous. I’d imagine, though, that you’re going to end up in the infinity WNDYR if you really get into it, because these video, image, AI platforms, they just eat up tokens. They just consume tokens. Credits like there’s no tomorrow. And nano The free is quite powerful. Then they got a basic at around $10, and then I got a pro at $30. I find that I was trying to do something with it a couple of and produce a landscape for YouTube, and I spent well over 2 hours and got extremely frustrated with it. So be warned, though. But I think open art, if you want to do something more special, it’s probably worth the effort. But I’d say be warned. I think we’re going to go for our middle break, folks, and when we got back, we got even some more free or inexpensive AI tools.
[00:24:07.520] – Jonathan Denwood
I think what we’ve done a good job, me and Kirk, is trying to find you things that actually can, that do work, that have some functionality that will really help you with your membership, either building content for it or marketing it, because there is a lot of AI out there that’s being pushed. And you watch people do a presentation in that, and they’re going 10, 15 minutes in it, and you’ve got absolutely no idea how this is really going to help you, or it’s so time consuming, the average business owner probably isn’t going to use it. But that’s my take on it. Like I say, we’re going to go for our middle break, folks. We’ll be back in a few Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out another free resource. That’s the WP Tonic Membership Machine Show newsletter. I do it weekly. It’s totally free. I normally take one of the subjects that we’ve discussed in this podcast and expand it a bit. I normally write an article about it and give more information, and I have it linked in the newsletter with a summary. Plus, I do a look around on the best AI tech stories of that week, and I choose about three or four of those, and I put those in the newsletter with a summary with a link to the main story.
[00:25:48.420] – Jonathan Denwood
So it’s a really useful resource. I do all this myself. And to get it, all you have to do is go over to Wp-tonic. Com/newsletter, Wp-tonic. Com/newsletter, and you can then sign up for free, and it will come in your inbox every week around Tuesday and Wednesday. So let’s go into it Gamma. I’m going to let you do Gamma, because I think it’s been one of our better finds, hasn’t it? I think I put this on your radar a few months, well, six, seven, eight months ago. And I think consistently, you still mention it, and I think you’re using it, aren’t you?
[00:26:33.500] Kurt von Ahnen
I do use it. Yeah. In fact, I am presenting at the Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce on January 30th, and the featured presentation was made in Gamma. It’s a really cool graphical tool. So notice I said graphical and not informative. So you can give it like an AI topic. You can give it a topic to make a presentation, and it’ll whip up a pretty cool-looking presentation. I love the appearance, the modern feel. It just looks good. You convert it to PowerPoint and everything just works. It’s great. But I have had to rewrite every single one of the presentations. So the wording, it gives you really good text, placeholder text placement, but you have to go through it. You still have to give it the human touch. But I have been really impressed that it’s making prettier presentations than I would make on my own.
[00:27:34.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and you can use it to produce lead magnets and other PDFs. It’s perfect for it, isn’t it?
[00:27:41.780] Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, because when I said I export it as a PowerPoint, it’s because I’m a presenter, right? So I can export the slides as a PowerPoint. I can export them as a PDF. I can export them and break them into word docs. I mean, you can do whatever you want with these things. The content is really good, and the imagery is really good. What I’m saying is the consistency and the layout that it gives you is awesome. And then to Jonathan’s point, you could take one of these really well, graphically well dialed slides and actually make it like the hero image of your website. There’s just so many applications that you could do with it. I like the way that it designs. Whoever trained it has a really good design sense. It doesn’t make sloppy-looking stuff.
[00:28:35.580] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s consistent, isn’t it?
[00:28:37.780] Kurt von Ahnen
Very consistent. Like I said, I don’t like the content.
[00:28:41.590] – Jonathan Denwood
In the quality level, I mean, it’s consistent in the quality that it produces visually.
[00:28:47.220] Kurt von Ahnen
The quality of the visuals, yeah. I don’t like the textual content that it generates. It just didn’t seem to generate smart text, but it’s the right amount of text, and it’s placed well It gives you a really good placeholder to modify with your content.
[00:29:04.540] – Jonathan Denwood
And the writing… But this is what… I use a lot of AI, folks, but this is the key thing I want you to understand. I think the way I and Kirk uses AI is different to what he’s classified as AI slop, is that anything on writing, I check it, and it is filled with outdated or factual mistakes. I’m writing most writing about things that I know about, so I can see the factual mistakes and the outdated information, and I edit it, so it doesn’t have those mistakes in it. But if you’re just writing stuff, like 100 articles for a website and you know nothing about the subject, it’s just going to be riddled with outdated or factual mistakes all over it. And that is AI slop, isn’t it, Kurt?
[00:30:12.380] Kurt von Ahnen
I think so, yeah.
[00:30:14.720] – Jonathan Denwood
But if you know the subject and you’re using it to assist you, or you’re using it to produce additional multimedia content like audio, video, and you’re also producing your own just to add more value value to the content that you’re producing, I don’t see anything wrong with that, do you?
[00:30:36.240] Kurt von Ahnen
No. Again, especially if you validate the content. There’s nothing wrong with using tools. Woodworkers back in the day didn’t have half the tools we have today, planes and chisels and hammers. And I mean, that’s the way they did things then. Now they’ve got machines. There’s still a craftsman generating a piece of wooden art. It’s the same way with the websites. You’re using a tool. As long as you are plugged in and you’re given the human touch, the human element to it, I really don’t have a complaint for it.
[00:31:15.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. On to another tool that I just think is fantastic, and it’s called Super Whispier. It’s for the Mac only, I think. It’s just made in North enormous difference to me. I was using the free, and then I’ve actually bought the lifetime deal. I also got a coupon code that knocked the price down a bit, but it’s developed by one developer. By the way, I will have all the show notes up for this by Tuesday or Wednesday, and I have all the links and the pricing, and also some of the YouTube reviews and materials that I’ve utilized to educate myself on all these products, and that will be all in the show notes on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. If you’re listening to this and you want to find out where you can buy it and more info, it will all be there. Super Whispier. There’s about three to four. There’s another one that was offering a lifetime deal, and it was actually a bit cheaper. It was about $80 for a lifetime deal or something. And then there’s another one that you can You can do the lifetime deal, which is normally $250. They do a month to month.
[00:32:52.480] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s free as well, fully functioning. And then they have a pro version that’s around $8 per month. Then they have a pro version, another pro, which you can buy yearly for $89. What does it do? Basically, you can set it up on a short key, You can speak to it. If you’re in a Word document or any text document or on a web page at the back end of WordPress, and you just have a short key and then you speak, And it turns it into text and it will place it. And its accuracy is really a very impressive, very impressive. And I tend to get stuck on the same larger words about my spelling. And I was just using Google. I just talked a quick sentence into Google, and it would find the right spelling for me. Well, I don’t have to do that anymore. And what this does also, it adapts to your style of speaking and the way your grammar and it works all that out. And it does a very It’s a collective job, and it does a load of other stuff. They’ve got a really good YouTube channel, the developer who’s very experienced.
[00:34:23.780] – Jonathan Denwood
He’s developed a couple of companies with fellow founders, which they have sold. Then he developed this, I think in Python, and it’s really quick as well. It’s using all… It uses a number. If you use the Pro, the paid version, you can select the large language model that you’re using. I just put it on automatic, and it’s just really quick as well. It’s made an enormous difference to me, Kurt. What do you reckon about this one?
[00:35:00.000] Kurt von Ahnen
Well, for one, you can put it on a Windows machine that’s Windows 10 or better. So that’s awesome. I used to do a ton of writing, and I don’t know if I’m just getting older and less patient or what, but it’s literally gotten to where typing things out, my brain’s going faster than my fingers, and I’m making mistakes like crazy.
[00:35:23.130] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m having an effect on you.
[00:35:25.460] Kurt von Ahnen
Having a back space and my hands hurt, they get sore after a while. And And so voice to text options do pop off for me sometimes. I used to use, way back when, I used to write things in like word, and a lot of people didn’t even realize that there was a dictation element in a word, Microsoft Word, you could just click dictation and then speak, and it would write the paper for you. That’s been around for a long, long, long, long time, and it worked pretty good. As AI has progressed, a lot of these tools have gotten better and better. And one of the things I’ve done for creating more posts for my website is I would talk to a video, like in Descript, and then use the transcript to actually write the post because I didn’t want to type the post out. I just got to where I hate typing. And so these tools like Super Whisper, they really creep to the top for me. The only thing that I don’t like about these types of tools, especially these people that put them in their phones, is they’re walking around in public, like in coffee shops or stores, talking out loud and having conversations with their phone.
[00:36:44.060] Kurt von Ahnen
That drives me insane. It drives me insane. And the Super Whisper or any voice to text tool, I will use if I’m in my home office and no one else’s home. But if people are home, I’m not using it. I just and behave like normal. That, to me, is the one caveat, is that the usage of them is limited based on your surroundings.
[00:37:10.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but it does a lot more than even what I’ve outlined. I’ll make sure the links in the show notes, folks. The developer has a really great YouTube channel where he talks to actual users, some of the videos are actual users, and they’ve done some amazing things that I didn’t even realize. I haven’t I’ve really looked at all the functionality. I’ve hardly touched the functionality of this tool, but I mean to, but it’s made a big difference, so I highly recommend it.
[00:37:43.000] Kurt von Ahnen
There’s a couple of things, I don’t know if you mentioned, I don’t think you did, that I think are important to consider. One of the things I really like about Super Whisper is its mantra is offline first. So everything happens on your device. It’s not like you’re saying, Hey, Google, and your My phone’s listening to you 24/7. In fact, my phone’s listening to me right now. I got to turn it off. Gemini is trying to jump into your business all the time. Siri, what’s the Amazon one? She wants Alexis or whatever her name is. They all want to be your best buddy and listen to you through the internet for the great controllers all the time. And apparently, the Super Whisper does everything on the device, which I think is cool.
[00:38:28.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, thanks for that. On to the next one, which is building your website builder. We think you should be using WordPress. There’s a couple that utilize AI, more than a couple, but the two The one I use on the WP tonic website. Kirk also uses it, but the other one Kirk has used quite a bit as well. I haven’t used it so extensively. To start with the one I got on the WP tonic website, but I don’t use the AI functionality. But it’s Cadence WP, and you’ve set it up for clients, haven’t you? Using the AI function. It does a pretty good job, doesn’t it?
[00:39:17.340] Kurt von Ahnen
I refer to it as the first draft. And so it creates a really awesome first draft of a complete website based on your topic, your business, your whatever information you put in there, it’s using and it’s creating headlines and placeholder content. You pick pictures or you can upload pictures through the process. It’s great. And the one thing that is unique about the Cadence WP platform for AI development of sites is it also has, I don’t want to say a complete SEO package, but it does consider search engine optimization for the delivery, which is a pretty cool plus.
[00:40:03.620] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Then the one that you’ve got a lot of experience with, and I’ve got a little bit, but not anything like yours, is Zip WP. Tell us about Zip WP.
[00:40:14.120] Kurt von Ahnen
I’ve built tons of websites in Zip WP. And we run the risk, Jonathan, you and I, doing this show, we run the risk of people coming for us when we say, Oh, you could build a website super fast and easy using Zip WP. And you can. That’s the simple truth of it. You can. I believe that certain web projects fall within certain use cases. And I have a lot of startup businesses that come through Manana Nomas, and their budget dictates that we use these simple tools. And it makes a really great first draft. And for a simple five-page marketing site, it gets them online. It gets their message online. And then, like I said, first draft. You go, then maybe you’re going to update some copy. Copywriting for an agency, I think, is where the real value of agency work comes in. But if someone doesn’t have 8, 10, 12, 15, or $100,000 for a website, if they’ve got a small budget, this is a great way to get started, and then they can learn as they go.
[00:41:20.420] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. The last one I’ve got is called recall. I haven’t used it. I’ve done some research on this one. Basically, it’s a separate They sell it as a separate product. You can put everything in it, like your documents, videos you’ve watched, everything. Then you can ask it questions. It’s cloud, it’s cloud-based, so you’re putting everything in it. The pricing isn’t that ridiculous. I think it’s about $8, $9 a month. They do have a free version, and then the $8, $9. This says in the name. It’s called Recall, and that’s what it does. What do you reckon about this one?
[00:42:04.960] Kurt von Ahnen
They made a sci-fi horror film called Total Recall. It reminds me of that. I thought this would be one of your primary tools. I thought you would have really liked this because you prefer bullet-pointed lists over long-form communication. I think this is a really cool tool for becoming a really good generalist across many larger subjects. This is a way to consolidate. It’s like enough… They say, enough to be dangerous. You know what I mean? This is a great way to know enough to be dangerous about many topics. It’s going to scrape all of the core ideas. It’s going to give you a strong, basic knowledge in a specific vertical, whatever you choose. You’re just not going to get every stink in detail, right? But that’s what you’re looking for. So this is a pretty cool tool.
[00:43:04.700] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s free or $10 a month. I was checking. If you go month to month.
[00:43:09.740] Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I was wondering how long that would go.
[00:43:13.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that price is going to go up, don’t you?
[00:43:16.840] Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it’s only $7 a month on the yearly plan, because that’s how I looked it up the first time. And I thought to myself, well, how many credits? The problem I have with all these AI tools is that they throw some fee out there, right? But it’s really easy. You get excited, and then you get in there, and you start playing, and the next thing you know, it goes, Oh, you’re out of credits. Do you want to buy more credits? Well, that’s not $7 a month anymore. So I’m curious, for $7 a month, how much is this thing really processing and giving me back? The other thing I don’t really believe is that they have a lot of copy on the website about security, safety, and privacy. I don’t know that any AI tool can really advertise that.
[00:44:06.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you’ve got every right to be a little bit suspicious. Now, as we come to the end of the show, is there any AI tool you would like to promote that I haven’t gone through, Kurt?
[00:44:20.560] Kurt von Ahnen
I put a note in the comments. It was, imagine AI was the one that made the headshot. Oh, yes.
[00:44:25.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Imagine.
[00:44:26.660] Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Imagine AI. It was so much fun. It was a really fun thing to do. I have pictures of me as a cowboy, as a spaceman. I got all kinds of things. So it was fun, right? That’s like an AI that’s fun. And then I think that we would be negligent if we just didn’t reshare with our listeners and viewers. We interviewed Dustin, the founder of Magi. And Magi combines many really great premium AI tools into a single subscription. So when you start saying, oh, this is seven dollars a month, and this is $20 a month, and this is $18 a month, it all starts to add up. But if you’re looking for really good access to a lot of AI tools, but you don’t know that you’re going to use any one of them extensively, Magi would be a really good solution to take a look at.
[00:45:22.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, of all the stuff that we’ve discussed, is there one that you think stands out?
[00:45:30.540] Kurt von Ahnen
Well, the one that stands out, Jonathan, is weird. It’s weird the way I think that it stands out, and that’s the Super Whisper thing. The Super Whisper really stands out because it allows you to use your machine in a different way. Computers have been incredibly… Pardon me, they’ve been incredibly tactile in their use, mice, keyboards, these things. And while voice-to-text isn’t incredibly new, I think they’ve taken it to a new level. Are you able to use the Super Whisper tool to run the computer, right? Open this app, close this app, do this, and you can talk to your computer and get it to do things almost like in Star Trek. I think that’s something a lot of people will really like. I just think you need a quiet workspace to use it effectively.
[00:46:23.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, my emphasis is on my ability to put my thoughts into coherent text. I can go quite a long time, and it has very few errors in it. Where Alator tools? There were other tools I used, and it was quicker for me to type and look up a word I couldn’t spell, realistically, but you don’t get that. The other one, so I was going to say Super Whisper, but seeing that you’ve said that, I’m going to go with Notebook, LLM, because I think, for what it does, it really does produce some stuff that you can use. You can use it for research, and it does a good job. And then you can use it to produce content that adds extra value to your website and your target audience. And it does it in a I think Gamma also is a tool that really the time you have to put in for the quality that you get back, it’s also in that matrix where a lot of AI tools, The amount of time and effort you have to put in for what you get out doesn’t quite meet what I’m looking for, if that makes sense, Kurt.
[00:47:58.420] Kurt von Ahnen
I think it does. I might need you to restate it, since I think you meant the opposite.
[00:48:03.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, we probably did. The amount of effort and time you have to put in with the tool, the AI tool, with the end result doesn’t really match. But I think with a lot of the tools that we’ve talked about, either they offer really pretty good value or they really do produce content or save your time. So, Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to.
[00:48:32.900] Kurt von Ahnen
Well, if you want to connect, I’m the only Kurt on LinkedIn, so I’m easy to find, and that’s a great way to make a connection. If it’s for business, manananomas. Com.
[00:48:44.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and if there are any topics or anything you’d like us to cover, the best thing is to go to the WPTonic YouTube channel and just leave a comment on this video or one of the other Membership Machine Show videos, what you would like us to discuss, and we will do our best to cover the subject that you want. We will be back next week to cover marketing, technology, or anything that can help you build a successful, community-focused membership website in 2026, not only for yourself but for your family. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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