The AI Tools Worth Using When You're Building a Side Income
8 min read
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AI tools are useful when they remove a job you would otherwise do badly or slowly. They are a waste of money when they add a job you did not have. Here is how the main categories look when you are working evenings and weekends on something small.
Building and site tools
This is where AI saves the most time for beginners, because the alternative is either learning to code or accepting a template that does not fit. You describe the page or app, review what comes back, and refine it in plain language.
- Good for: getting a working site up in hours instead of weeks.
- Watch out for: accepting a first draft you do not understand. Read the page as a visitor would before you publish it.
Recommended: Lovable
The category example worth trying first if you want a real, custom site rather than a template.
Try Lovable →Writing and research
AI writing is a strong first-draft tool and a weak final-draft tool. It is genuinely good at outlines, rewriting something you already wrote badly, and turning your rough notes into readable paragraphs. It is unreliable at facts, prices, dates and anything specific to your market.
The practical rule: never publish a claim the model produced that you cannot verify yourself. Readers forgive plain writing. They do not forgive being told something untrue.
Images
Generated images are fine for backgrounds, illustrations and abstract headers. They are a bad choice for anything a reader will treat as evidence — product photos, screenshots, before-and-afters, or pictures of people you imply are customers.
Automation
Automation pays off once a task repeats every week. Before then, doing it by hand is faster than building the automation. Early on, the only ones usually worth setting up are the ones that stop you forgetting something: a new sign-up gets a welcome email, a new sale gets logged, a form submission reaches your inbox.
Recommended: ConvertKit
Covers the automation that matters first — capturing emails and sending the sequence that follows.
Try ConvertKit →Analytics
Install something simple on day one, then mostly ignore it. With small numbers, daily traffic tells you nothing and checking it becomes a way to feel busy. Look monthly, and only at two things: how many people arrived, and how many did the one action you care about.
What to skip early on
- Paid tools with annual plans before you have a single customer.
- Anything that generates volume — bulk articles, bulk posts, bulk outreach. It creates work to clean up and damages trust.
- Complex dashboards. A spreadsheet handles your first hundred customers.
- Custom AI chat features on your site before anyone is visiting it.
A reasonable starting stack is one builder, one writing assistant, one email tool and one analytics script. If a new tool does not replace something on that list or remove an hour of weekly work, leave it.
What to do next
- List the three tasks that take you longest each week.
- Look for a tool only for those three.
- Use free tiers until a tool has clearly earned its monthly fee.
- Verify every fact before it goes on your site.
- Browse the Akacen guides for the next step.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you sign up through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Read more about who publishes this on the publisher profile.