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🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and digital hacks to help creators like you do more with less effort.

This week: how to use AI to build sites & apps

I’ve always been curious about coding. I’ve learned a fair bit over the years… but not enough to build a full site or app from the ground up. And let’s face it, between work and parenting, there’s zero time to dive back in.

So when I needed a quick site for my YouTube channel, I asked AI to step in.

Spoiler: it did ✔️

And before I knew it, I had a half-decent site taking shape, and even managed to fit in a few nappy changes and bottle feeds along the way 🍼.

Below are the tools that made that little miracle happen. And I will also share a greedy SaaS move that broke our workflow, the password tool I can’t live without, and a smart way to create AI images of yourself ✨.

Lovable

Lovable is like magic for an impatient individual like me. You write a quick prompt like “Build me a personal website for my digital consultancy business with the following details...” and within minutes, you've got a draft ready to tweak. I tested it one morning, and it had something (very decent) drafted before I even finished grinding my morning coffee beans ☕. Other platforms like Cursor or Claude Code handle complex projects better, but Lovable is by far the easiest to use.

It can be used to build all kinds of mini-projects, landing pages, business calculators, you name it. Robert, at our sister site EmailTooltester, used it to build a smart travel suggestion app that picks destinations based on your home currency. I can’t wait to see how far this can go.

🔁 Alternative to: Cursor, Firebase and Claude Code

Visit 👉 lovable.dev​

💰 From $25 a month | Free plan available

Uizard

I don't have an eye for web design. Layouts and proportions just stress me out. So when I needed a homepage for my YouTube channel, I gave Uizard a prompt and let the AI do the rest. It came back with a solid first wireframe, and from there, I just dragged and dropped to tweak things, or asked the AI assistant for help.

You can even sketch something on paper, or upload a screenshot of a site you like, and Uizard will replicate the structure / design for you. It also comes with loads of templates like landing pages, mobile apps, SaaS dashboards, and startup pitch decks, all ready to remix.

🔁 Alternative to: Figma, Canva, Framer or Adobe XD

Visit 👉 uizard.io​

💰 From $12 | Free plan available

Hostinger

You need a solid host to publish all those AI-made wonders. I’ve tested dozens of providers over the years, and some were truly painful. Hostinger, though, has been a pleasant surprise. It’s fast enough for most projects and far more affordable than many big-name hosts, with a clean, beginner-friendly interface I really like – hello assisted migrations and built-in file manager. It also offers Horizons, a no-code AI web app builder similar to Lovable.

I’m hosting my YouTube channel site at Hostinger. I need a different type of hosting called VPS, since the site runs on Django (yep, AI helped build it). The VPS costs less than $5 a month, which is a bargain compared to other providers. But unless you require a special setup like mine, the regular hosting plan starting at $2.99/month will do just fine.

🔁 Alternative to: Bluehost, GoDaddy, etc.

Visit 👉 hostinger.com​

💰 From $2.99 a month | Price increases at renewal.

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

Getting locked out of tools is a productivity killer. That’s why I swear by Bitwarden, a simple and secure password manager that lives on my phone, and laptop. It auto-fills passwords, stores logins, and even helps generate strong ones when I’m signing up for new tools.

I encouraged my wife to use Bitwarden after too many password fiascos too. She kept forgetting logins, constantly resetting them, and even got temporarily locked out of her online banking. Since switching to Bitwarden, everyone’s a lot less stressed 😌.

I used to be on LastPass but got tired of its sync issues, as I was constantly missing saved logins. Bitwarden just works. It has a solid free plan, and if you ever need more, the paid version starts at just $1 a month.

🔁 Alternative to: LastPass, iCloud Keychain and 1Password

Visit 👉 bitwarden.com​

💰 From $1/month | Free plan

⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack

As I mentioned, I run a YouTube channel (too embarrassed to share the link, sorry), and one thing I make a lot of are: thumbnails. Lately, I’ve been using AI to generate images of myself doing... stuff. Bit weird, yes, but also kind of addictive.

There are several tools for this, but I’ve been using Replicate.com, which I found cheap as chips. The interface looks a bit dated (see video above), but it gets the job done. Here's how it works:

1. Create an account and add a few dollars, ($5 should be enough)
2. Search for the model you want to use. I used "fast-flux-trainer"
3. Upload 5–10 clear photos of yourself
4. Train the model up ($2–$5 depending on settings)
5. Then prompt it to generate the picture you need

Please, please, please, use this with caution, and keep it fun, not creepy. It’s a handy little trick if you want to stand out without staging another awkward photo shoot. Check this mini tutorial.

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

Never trust a monkey with your automations (or money) 🐒

We’ve been using Mailchimp’s Pay As You Go plan for a long time. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked, and we had a healthy balance of Monkey Credits to keep things running. A few weeks ago, they decided to remove access to automations unless you pay for a recurrent subscription. Yes, very greedy 🤑.

That change threw a wrench into our email setup. Most of what we were sending relied on automations. Thankfully, we’d already started shifting to Brevo. But it was a good reminder: SaaS platforms aren’t always on your side. Sometimes they’re just chasing more revenue.

If you depend on a tool, have a Plan B. And make sure switching to something else won’t be a total nightmare.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll dive into automating your business, so you can get more done with less time.

Cheers,

Josep

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