Sean's Current Stack: The Full Reveal

Current stack, current costs, current honest assessment. No tool is on this list because I thought I should have it. Every tool is on this list because I use it and it earns its cost.

Notion ($16/month)

Central knowledge base, project documentation, content calendar, and notes. I open Notion before anything else every morning. The $16 is for the Plus tier — team collaboration features I use for three specific projects. The Free tier handles everything else I do in Notion.

Linear (See Sean's full review →) ($8/month)

Project tracking, issue management, sprint cycles. Linear handles the work that has defined status states and needs to move through them clearly. I tried three other tools at this price point. Linear is faster than all of them. The interface is the reason people recommend it and the reason I stayed.

Obsidian (Free)

Linked notes, reading highlights, and the knowledge layer that connects information across projects. Local first, no subscription, plugin ecosystem for the features I actually use. Replaced three paid tools. Has not required me to wish for any of them back.

Claude Pro ($20/month)

Long documents, code review, extended reasoning tasks, and first drafts of things requiring sustained context. The highest per-tool ROI in the stack. I say this having also paid for ChatGPT Plus and a specialized AI writing tool. Claude Pro replaced both and handles more total surface area.

Zapier ($12/month)

Four active automations. All four handle repetitive connections between tools that would otherwise require manual steps multiple times per week. $12/month for automation that saves more than 12 minutes per week of manual work is priced correctly.

Loom ($15/month)

Async video communication. I send approximately eight Loom videos per week. Without Loom, those eight are either meetings or very long emails. Eight shorter Looms per week versus eight meetings per week is approximately four hours recovered per week. The most underrated productivity improvement on this list.

Total: $71/month. Down from $215 at peak in 2023. The work is the same. The stack is cleaner. The Saturday mornings are free.