Most lists of free AI tools run to fifty apps. Nobody uses fifty apps. This is the short list Side Hustles 313 runs on: the tools behind our own Instagram pages, this website and the ad we just finished, what each one costs, and where each one falls short.
One thing up front so nobody feels tricked: the AI assistant that does most of the work is a paid subscription. We use Claude, and it's the one real bill in this setup. Everything around it is free, open source, or a free tier we haven't outgrown.
Posting: one approval, five platforms
Posting by hand to Instagram, Facebook, Threads, TikTok and YouTube eats a lot of a day if you let it. So we built our own posting engine. A finished post lands on one review screen. Nothing goes out until we press Post, and then that one approved post goes to every platform the page is connected on.
It runs on Supabase and on each platform's own official API, and none of them charge to publish. Every platform has a catch, and you should know them before you build anything like this:
- TikTok drops the video in your TikTok inbox as a draft. You still open the app and tap Post.
- Threads cuts captions at 500 characters.
- YouTube allows about six uploads a day per Google project, and uploads from a project Google hasn't audited can come out private.
- TikTok and YouTube take video only.
The same setup saves a daily snapshot of followers, views and engagement for every page, so what we post next comes from numbers instead of guesses.
Don't want to build your own? Meta Business Suite is free and schedules posts to Instagram and a Facebook Page. Postiz is an open-source scheduler you can host yourself for free. Start with one of those.
Design and video: the Craft apps
Our graphics and video edits start in a set of free, open-source desktop apps called the Crafting Apps. Each one works like a paid program you already know: FigCraft like Figma, PhotoCraft like Photoshop, VectorCraft like Illustrator, FilmCraft like Premiere, EffectCraft like After Effects, and SoundCraft for audio. The AI drives them through their command-line tools, and we check every render by eye before it goes anywhere.
Our website ad came out of them: we laid out the frames in FigCraft, animated them in EffectCraft and mixed the beat in SoundCraft.
The catch: they're early software, and their own developers say so. Features go missing, and a command that worked last month can act differently after an update. If you can't babysit software, a free web tool is the safer pick. For us, keeping every source file and paying nothing for it is worth the rough edges.
The video tools nobody sees
Under the edits sit three free command-line tools:
- ffmpeg converts, trims and resizes video. A lot of video apps use it under the hood.
- faster-whisper turns speech into a transcript on your own computer, which is the first step to captions.
- auto-editor cuts the dead air out of long recordings.
If an AI assistant runs them, you never have to open them yourself. You describe the job, and it types the command.
Checks before anything goes out
AI makes it cheap to make a lot of mediocre stuff fast. Two free checkers keep ours in line.
antislop reads copy and design for the habits that make something read as machine-made, like filler words and made-up stats. Every caption we post goes through it.
Motionmaxxing checks a finished video for frozen stretches, blank frames, a dead hold at the end, and loudness. We ran it on our own website ad before posting it, and it flagged four short runs of flat color between scenes. That's exactly the kind of thing you stop seeing after the twentieth watch.
Planning: Notion
Our schedule, project pages and content ideas live in Notion. The AI reads it at the start of a work session and writes a log at the end, so nothing depends on anyone remembering what happened last Tuesday. Notion has a free plan, and a setup like this is a few pages and a couple of databases.
Websites: Cloudflare Pages
This site runs on Cloudflare Pages, and the hosting costs nothing. The only bill is the web address, about $12 to $20 a year. The sites we build for clients go on a free Cloudflare account in the owner's name, so the owner keeps it.
If you're starting from zero
Go in this order, and stop at any step that already covers what you need:
- Claim your free Google Business Profile. It's what shows up when someone looks your business up on Google Maps.
- Put up a simple site on free hosting.
- Pick one scheduler and post from one place.
- Learn one design app well before you add a second.
- Add an AI assistant last, once you know which of these jobs eats your week.
Learn it here, or hand it off
We'll keep writing up how each piece works, free, right here on the blog. If you'd rather skip the setup and get back to running your business, Side Hustles 313 can do it for you: websites, Google Business Profile setup and the rest, at fixed prices.