Every week someone asks "which AI tool should we buy?" It's almost always the wrong question.
The right question is: "which combination of free-and-cheap tools, wired together with 20 lines of glue, solves my problem for zero recurring cost?" That's the stack we run for our own agency work and for clients — mid-market brands who don't need enterprise pricing to get enterprise output.
Here's what we actually use across a typical week at Pulse, and how the pieces fit.
Layer 1: The thinking layer (LLMs)
Anthropic Claude — our default
Cost: AED 75/month for Pro, AED 0 for lightweight use via API pay-as-you-go.
Where we use it: First-draft strategy documents, campaign concept generation, code review, complex research synthesis, client email drafts, analysis of long PDF client briefs. Claude reads long documents better than any other tool as of Q3 2026 and is the least likely to hallucinate on nuanced work.
ChatGPT — secondary
Cost: AED 75/month for Plus.
Where we use it: Image generation (DALL-E), quick brainstorms, when Claude is being overly cautious. Voice mode for phone-a-friend problem solving.
Perplexity — research
Cost: Free tier + AED 75/month Pro if needed.
Where we use it: Live research that needs sources — competitor pricing, recent regulation changes, market sizing. Beats ChatGPT and Claude for anything time-sensitive because it cites live web sources.
Layer 2: The building layer (product & site)
Lovable — AI app builder
Cost: Free tier + paid plans from AED 100/month.
Where we use it: Client dashboards, internal admin tools, quick MVP builds. Anything that would previously have taken a React developer 2 weeks now takes 4 hours in Lovable. Not a replacement for production engineering, but perfect for prototypes and internal tools.
Cursor / Claude Code — coding
Cost: AED 75/month Cursor Pro; Claude Code is free via Claude Pro.
Where we use it: Every line of production code we ship goes through one of these. Cursor for larger codebases, Claude Code for CLI workflows and quick scripts. Speeds up coding by 3-5x for experienced developers.
Cloudflare Pages + Workers — hosting & deployment
Cost: Free for 100K requests/day, then pennies.
Where we use it: Every Pulse-built site. Global CDN, instant deploys, custom domains, no server management. This site (pulseagency.ae) runs on it.
Supabase — database & auth
Cost: Free for small projects, ~AED 100/month for real production.
Where we use it: Postgres database, auth, storage, real-time subscriptions. When we need a proper backend for an app, this is the default.
Layer 3: The analytics layer
Google Analytics 4 — free, mandatory
Cost: Free (with Consent Mode v2 for compliance).
Where we use it: Baseline web analytics on every site. GA4 is not our favourite (BigQuery export helps), but it's free and the industry default. We pair it with CookieYes for consent management.
Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster
Cost: Free.
Where we use it: Every SEO project starts here. Bing Webmaster tools now feed Bing, DuckDuckGo AND ChatGPT's web tool — so Bing SEO matters again for the first time in a decade.
BigQuery — free tier for MENA-scale brands
Cost: Free for 10GB storage + 1TB query/month. Real cost usually AED 50-200/month.
Where we use it: Anywhere we need cross-source data joins — GA4 + Meta + Google Ads + CRM data. Set up dbt on top and you have a proper analytics warehouse.
Layer 4: The automation glue
Make (formerly Integromat) — visual automation
Cost: Free tier, then AED 40-200/month.
Where we use it: When we need Zapier-style workflows but with more logic. Multi-step automation across Google Sheets, HubSpot, Slack, WhatsApp.
Zapier — when Make is overkill
Cost: Free tier, AED 100/month Pro.
Where we use it: Simple 2-step triggers. Form submission → Slack notification → email confirmation. Fast to set up, no thinking required.
n8n — self-hosted alternative
Cost: Free (self-hosted on your own server).
Where we use it: For clients who want to own their automation infrastructure. Same workflows as Make/Zapier but running on their AWS/Cloudflare instance.
Layer 5: Design & creative
Figma — non-negotiable
Cost: Free for small teams, ~AED 60/user/month at scale.
Where we use it: Every design deliverable. Auto-layout + variables + design tokens = design system that engineers can actually implement.
Midjourney — imagery
Cost: AED 40/month.
Where we use it: Concept imagery, mood boards, campaign visuals when we need something original. Not for final client-brand-critical work, but for exploration.
Layer 6: Communication
Google Workspace — email & storage
Cost: AED 25/user/month.
Where we use it: Everything client-facing. Contact email, docs, shared drives. Cheaper and better integrated than Microsoft 365 for teams under 20 in MENA.
Slack — internal + client channels
Cost: Free tier for small teams.
Where we use it: One dedicated Slack Connect channel per client retainer. Beats email threads and WhatsApp for structured project comms.
WhatsApp Business — when clients insist
Cost: Free.
Where we use it: When client stakeholders won't use anything else. UAE reality — 80% of MENA business communication still happens on WhatsApp.
How it fits together — a real workflow
Here's what a typical week using this stack looks like for a Pulse client:
- Monday morning — Claude reads over the weekend's campaign performance data from BigQuery, drafts the Monday performance summary in the client Slack channel.
- Tuesday — We identify a landing page test needed. Lovable builds the variant in 90 minutes. Cloudflare Pages deploys instantly. Meta pixel tracks conversions via server-side tagging.
- Wednesday — Client asks for a new dashboard combining Meta + Google Ads + Shopify data. Ahmed builds the BigQuery pipeline with dbt in 3 hours. Looker Studio dashboard shared with client that evening.
- Thursday — Nariman drafts campaign creative in Figma using Midjourney for exploration. Presented to client, revised, approved. Motion versions rendered.
- Friday — Make automation posts weekly Slack summary to client channel, drops PDF report in shared Drive, emails stakeholders.
Total tools used above: 15. Total monthly cost for the whole stack per Pulse team member: roughly AED 400-600 (heavily variable based on usage). What you'd pay a typical enterprise agency to deliver the same output: AED 40,000+ retainer, with only 15% of that going into actual senior operator time.
The counterintuitive lesson
The point of this stack is not that it's cheap. The point is that the tools are the least interesting part.
Every senior operator we know uses roughly the same stack. What separates good work from mediocre work isn't which tools you pick — it's whether you know when to combine them, when to skip them, and when to build something bespoke instead.
If you're leading a marketing team and looking at your AED 200K SaaS bill wondering if it's earning its keep — talk to us. Half the time the honest answer is "no, kill three of these tools and hire one more senior person."
— Ahmed