I have a confession. I once counted my active software subscriptions and nearly fell out of my chair. Half of them I hadn’t opened in months. So when I came across a post from Ruben Hassid, an AI creator who decided to ruthlessly cut his stack down to the essentials, I stopped scrolling and read every word.
What I love about the original poster’s approach is the honesty. He’s not chasing shiny new tools. He’s naming the five he actually opens every single day, and explaining why each one quietly replaced something bigger and more expensive. His list got smaller over the years, not bigger. That’s rare.
Let me walk you through his picks, because the reasoning behind each one is where the real value hides.
1. ChatGPT to replace Photoshop
Here’s the twist. The creator doesn’t use ChatGPT for writing or work. He uses it purely to make images. Think infographics, quick visuals, and edits he’d normally open a heavy design app for.
His favorite move is the built-in edit mode. Once you generate an image, you don’t start over to tweak it. You just click and talk to it:
- Click on the image you generated with ChatGPT
- ChatGPT enters an “edit mode” that’s genuinely easy to use
- Say what you want changed, and stay on “high” quality mode
One tip the expert stresses: if you’re making an infographic, grab a reference image from Pinterest first. He says the prompt does almost nothing without a visual reference to anchor the style. That’s a detail most people miss, and I think it explains why so many AI image attempts come out looking generic.
2. Wispr Flow to replace Siri
This one surprised me. The author uses Wispr Flow not just to replace a voice assistant, but to fix a very human problem: laziness. We under-prompt our AI because typing long, detailed instructions is tiring.
His fix is to talk instead of type. When he’s speaking, he gets into what he calls a “yapping flow state,” dumping a big, rich chunk of context by voice in seconds. The result? Faster, better answers, and as a bonus he saves Claude tokens by front-loading everything at once instead of dragging out a long back-and-forth.
Why it matters: the quality of what you get out of AI depends on the quality of what you put in. Voice removes the friction that keeps most people typing lazy one-liners.
3. Claude instead of ChatGPT
Once images are handled by ChatGPT, this industry pro reaches for Claude for basically everything else. And he argues it replaces far more than just other chatbots.
According to the post, Claude quietly stands in for a whole shelf of tools:
- Finance tasks and legal cleanups
- Design work with Claude Design
- A coding tool via Claude Code plus connectors like Netlify and Supabase
- Email drafting when connected to Gmail
- A personal assistant when connected to his call notes
- Building spreadsheets from scratch
The pattern here is worth noticing. One capable AI, connected to your real accounts and tools, absorbs the jobs you used to spread across five apps.
4. Google Docs and Sheets instead of Microsoft
Short and blunt from the creator. He’s fully on Google Docs and Sheets, and admits he feels bad for people still wrestling with Word, Excel, or Teams.
The logic is simplicity and speed. Cloud-first, always synced, easy to share, and it plays nicely with the AI tools above. No heavy installs, no version-file chaos.
5. Gamma instead of Google Slides
For presentations, the author skips Google Slides, PowerPoint, and even Claude Design in favor of Gamma. His reason is the Templates feature, which gets you to a polished, professional design almost instantly.
He shared a clean little workflow for it:
- Open Gamma and go to the left menu
- Search for “Templates” and scroll through them
- Choose one and hit “Create from template,” then prompt it
- Use the prompt: “Make 20-slides on this topic”
That slide count detail is the clever part. The mind behind this notes that if you don’t specify, Gamma tends to fall back to 8 slides, which usually isn’t enough. As he puts it, the world still runs on slides and emails in 2026, so getting decks done fast is a real edge.
Quick recap of the stack
Here’s the whole list the original poster pays for and actually uses daily:
- ChatGPT for images
- Wispr Flow for dictation
- Claude for everything and then some
- Google Workspace for Docs and Sheets
- Gamma for slides, plus a meeting-notes tool for call transcripts
He’s honest that he still pays for 20-plus other tools in the background. But this is his “open it every day” shortlist, and everything else is just infrastructure.
The part that stuck with me is his closing thought. His stack keeps shrinking, not growing. He even wonders out loud whether in three years he’ll be paying for just one tool, and whether that tool ends up being Google or Claude.
I think that’s the real lesson here. The goal isn’t collecting more AI toys. It’s finding the few that quietly do the work of many, then cutting the rest loose. Take a look at your own subscriptions this week and ask which ones you’d actually miss.
Want the full breakdown with the creator’s exact wording? Go read the original LinkedIn post for the complete details.