What I actually use
Hands-on reviews of AI hardware and software by Lachlan Coleman-Barrett, an AI systems consultant in Chiang Mai. Every product here was used for months before anything was written, whether bought with my own money or adopted as open-source tooling. Nothing was sent free, and there are no affiliate links.
Each review is scored against the same five axes, and the rubric is printed on every page so the number can be argued with. A rating you cannot interrogate is not worth having.
The set grows slowly on purpose. A review requires real use, so this will never be a catalogue of everything on the market. What it can do is answer the specific questions that only turn up after months of ownership.
- AI wearable4.5/5
Omi
Omi is worth buying if you want your conversations to become data you can act on, not just a record to search. Six months in, worn for group talks and one-on-ones that matter, it feeds a daily summariser running on my own VPS, which means I start each day with context rather than trying to reconstruct what was said from memory.
- Verdict
- kept
- Used for
- 6 months, 4 to 5 days a week
- CMS3.6/5
Carrd
For a one-pager or an MVP, yes, and cheaply. For anything that needs to rank on search queries or carry a blog, no. Carrd is genuinely one of the cheapest ways to put a site up at all, and for the right scope it delivers that without friction. The concrete limits are no CMS or blog section, limited SEO capability, and form handling that does not hold up well in practice. The product is worth its price inside the job it is actually built for.
- Verdict
- kept
- Used for
- About one year, running one client site
- Web framework4.4/5
Next.js
Next.js is probably the best framework available for building a modern site, if you can write code. Six to seven months in, running several of my own sites including this one, nothing broke and nothing required patching. The friction score is 2 and that number is honest: the technical prerequisite is steep, and this is not a tool for people who are not technical and do not want to work with a codebase.
- Verdict
- kept
- Used for
- Six to seven months, several sites including this one
- Voice AI4.5/5
ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs is worth it if voice is central to your work or systems. Transcription accuracy is high enough for daily use, conversational voice agents are at a quality that sustains repeated use, and the platform integrates with real business workflows. If voice is peripheral to what you do, the case is harder to make. Six to seven months in, still paying, still using.
- Verdict
- kept
- Used for
- Six to seven months, transcription and voice agents
- CRM and marketing automation platform4.2/5
GoHighLevel
GoHighLevel costs US$97 a month for 3 sub-accounts, US$297 for unlimited sub-accounts, or US$497 for the SaaS-mode plan, as listed on its pricing page on 17 October 2026. Annual billing is US$970, US$2,970 and US$4,970. Phone, SMS, email and AI are billed on top by usage. I do not pay those list prices. Two years in, I get access through a Skool community that resells sub-accounts at US$99 a month with unlimited sub-accounts, which is a route no pricing page covers.
- Verdict
- kept
- Used for
- 2 years
- Dictation app4.0/5
Wispr Flow
Wispr Flow got my names and jargon right more often than the free app I replaced it with, and I still cancelled it. I paid US$15 a month for Flow Pro for 11 months, from November 2025 to September 2026, and dictated most of my Claude Code prompts with it. The Windows app never failed me. I left because Handy, a free open-source app that runs on my own laptop, became good enough for the way I dictate. Flow is free up to 2,000 words a week on desktop. Pro is US$15 a month, or US$12 a month billed yearly, as listed on its pricing page on 19 October 2026.
- Verdict
- cancelled
- Used for
- 11 months, daily