7 AI Tools I Use to Run a Farm and 5 Digital Brands

People ask me what tools I use. Usually they're expecting a list of SaaS products with affiliate links. What they get instead is something stranger: a filmmaker-turned-farmer who built a custom AI operating system for six brands, mostly using free tools.

Here's the honest walkthrough. Every tool I actually use, every day, with real costs and what each one replaced.

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The Setup

I run Mangaroa Farms (regenerative farm, direct-to-consumer meat and produce), BROS (men's circles across New Zealand), Lucid Living (breathwork and wellness bookings), Build With Billy (AI consulting), and a couple of other projects. From a Mac Mini in my home office and an iPhone in the paddock.

The entire digital operation — websites, email, marketing, task management, reporting, content, compliance docs — runs through seven core tools. Most of them cost nothing.

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Tool 1: Claude Code — The Foundation

What it is: Anthropic's command-line interface for Claude. You open a terminal, type claude, and talk to an AI that can read files, write code, execute commands, and connect to external services.

What it does for me: Everything. Claude Code is the interface I use for all work. I don't switch between apps. I describe what I need — "draft the newsletter," "check my email," "create a task for the butchery compliance docs" — and Claude Code does it.

It's not a chatbot. It's a working environment. Claude Code reads my project files, understands my codebase, connects to all my business tools through MCP servers, and executes multi-step workflows. Build a landing page. Generate a board report. Process a voice note into tasks. Deploy a website. All from one terminal.

Why CLI, not chat: Browser-based AI can answer questions. Claude Code can do work. The difference is access — Claude Code has hands. It can touch your files, run your scripts, call your APIs. Browser Claude is an advisor. Claude Code is a colleague.

Monthly cost: Included in my Anthropic subscription.

What it replaced: Context-switching between 15 different apps. A project manager. Most of what I used to pay a virtual assistant for.

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Tool 2: MCP Servers — 50+ Custom Connections

What it is: MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard for connecting AI to external tools and data. Each MCP server exposes tools that Claude Code can call — read email, create tasks, pull sales data, post to social media.

What it does for me: MCP is what makes Claude Code useful for business, not just coding. I've built 50+ MCP tools across all my brands:

• Gmail tools (two separate Google Workspace accounts) — inbox, search, draft, triage, archive
• Calendar tools — today's schedule, upcoming week, create events
• Shopify tools — orders, products, inventory, customer data, analytics
• Klaviyo tools — newsletter drafting, campaign creation, subscriber management, metrics
• Airtable tools — task management, project tracking, strategy logs
• Google Drive tools — file search, document creation, meeting notes
• Brain tools — knowledge query, ingestion, pattern tracking
• Social tools — Buffer, Bluesky, X posting
• Conservation tools — TrapNZ predator data, biodiversity tracking

Each tool was built to solve a specific problem. I didn't build 50 tools in a weekend — I built them one at a time over two years as pain points surfaced.

Monthly cost: $0. MCP servers run locally on my Mac Mini.

What it replaced: Manual data entry. Copy-pasting between apps. The gaps between tools where information gets lost.

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Tool 3: n8n — Workflow Automation

What it is: An open-source workflow automation platform. Think Zapier, but self-hosted, more powerful, and free.

What it does for me: n8n handles the automated pipelines that run without me touching anything:

• Signal media pipeline: Farm content gets processed, captioned in our brand voice, and queued for social media. Automatically.
• Webhook routing: External events (form submissions, payment confirmations, calendar changes) trigger workflows.
• Social posting: Content moves from drafting to scheduling to publishing across platforms.
• Data sync: Keeps systems in sync — when a Shopify order comes in, relevant data propagates to where it needs to go.

The key difference between n8n and MCP: MCP tools are called by Claude Code when I (or an agent) ask for something. n8n workflows run on triggers — they watch for events and act automatically.

Monthly cost: Hosted on Railway — roughly $5-10/month depending on usage.

What it replaced: Zapier ($50-100/month for the automations I need). Manual processes that only happened when I remembered to do them.

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Tool 4: Airtable — The Project Backbone

What it is: A database that looks like a spreadsheet. Flexible enough for task management, project tracking, CRM, and strategy logging.

What it does for me: Airtable is the single source of truth for all projects:

• Tasks table: Every task has a title, project link, status (Todo/In Progress/Done/Blocked), priority, due date, client tag, and description. My AI agents read from and write to this table.
• Projects table: All active projects across all brands, with status and ownership.
• Strategy log: Every significant decision gets logged with reasoning and context.
• Weekly reviews: Rolling summaries of what was accomplished.

The live dashboard on buildwithbilly.ai reads directly from Airtable. When a task moves to "In Progress," it shows on the site. When it's "Done," it shows in the completed feed. This is how I practice building in public — the dashboard shows real work, not curated posts.

Monthly cost: $0 (free tier covers my usage).

What it replaced: Notion (which I found too unstructured for task management). Sticky notes. The mental overhead of remembering what needed doing across six brands.

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Tool 5: Supabase — Databases for Everything

What it is: An open-source backend platform. Databases, authentication, file storage, real-time subscriptions. Essentially Firebase but open-source and Postgres-based.

What it does for me: Every web app I build runs on Supabase:

• Community platform (community.buildwithbilly.ai) — user accounts, authentication, product access, onboarding state
• Booking systems — event registrations, booking state, user profiles
• Dashboards — data storage for analytics and reporting
• Evidence vault — encrypted SQLite storage for conservation and impact data

Supabase gives me a real Postgres database for every project. That means proper queries, proper relations, proper data integrity. Not a spreadsheet pretending to be a database.

Monthly cost: $0 (free tier per project — I run multiple projects within the free tier).

What it replaced: Firebase ($25/month). Custom database hosting ($20-50/month). The temptation to use Airtable for things that need a real database.

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Tool 6: Resend — Transactional Email

What it is: An email API for sending transactional emails (booking confirmations, magic links, receipts, notifications). Not newsletters — those go through Klaviyo.

What it does for me: Every automated email across all brands:

• Booking confirmations for Lucid Living
• Magic link authentication for the community platform
• Event registration confirmations
• Post-call follow-ups (drafted by AI, sent after my review)
• System notifications

Resend handles the emails that need to arrive reliably and immediately. The API is clean, the deliverability is solid, and the dashboard shows exactly what was sent.

Monthly cost: $0 (free tier: 3,000 emails/month — more than enough for my volume).

What it replaced: SendGrid ($20/month). A janky SMTP setup that occasionally dropped emails.

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Tool 7: Vercel — Hosting Everything

What it is: A hosting platform for web applications. Push code to GitHub, Vercel builds and deploys it. Automatic preview deployments for testing, production deployments when you're ready.

What it does for me: Every website and web app runs on Vercel:

• buildwithbilly.ai (Next.js 15, GSAP animations)
• community.buildwithbilly.ai (Next.js, Supabase auth)
• stories.mangaroa.org (Astro, field journal blog)
• dashboard.mangaroa.org (Shopify + Klaviyo + Meta analytics)
• butcher.mangaroa.org (butchery management)
• Multiple other project sites

The deployment workflow is: make changes locally with Claude Code → push to GitHub → Vercel auto-deploys. Preview URLs for testing, production when ready. Rollbacks if something breaks. Edge functions for API routes.

Monthly cost: $0 (free tier handles all my projects — including custom domains, preview deployments, and edge functions).

What it replaced: A VPS I was paying $40/month for. Manual deployments via SSH. The stress of "did the deploy work?"

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Bonus Tools

These aren't daily drivers but they're essential parts of the stack:

Whisper (MLX): Runs locally on Apple Silicon. Transcribes voice notes in seconds. No cloud, no data leaving my machine. This powers the voice-to-task pipeline — I send a voice note, it gets transcribed locally, and Claude processes it into tasks, strategy notes, and brain entries.

GSAP + Lenis: The animation stack for buildwithbilly.ai. GSAP handles scroll-triggered animations, Lenis handles smooth scrolling. The site feels premium because the interactions are intentional, not template-default.

Stripe: Payments for all Build With Billy products. The Brain Starter Kit ($27), Claude Code Skills Pack ($15), and future products. API-first, no-nonsense payments.

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The Cost Breakdown

Here's the monthly total for running six brands:

Total: roughly $220/month for the complete digital infrastructure of six brands.

For comparison, a single Zapier Pro plan costs $50/month. A basic Squarespace site costs $27/month. Most businesses pay more for one tool than I pay for the entire stack.

The secret isn't finding cheap tools. The secret is building with tools that have generous free tiers and investing the savings into the one tool that matters most: Claude Code.

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What Each Tool Replaced

Conservative estimate: $670-1,050/month in tools and services replaced. And that doesn't account for the time savings, which are harder to quantify but probably more valuable.

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The Philosophy Behind the Stack

Three principles guided every tool choice:

1. Own your data. Every tool either runs locally (Claude Code, MCP, Whisper) or stores data in systems I control (Supabase, Airtable). Nothing critical lives in a platform that could disappear or change pricing overnight.

2. Free tiers are real. I'm not cheapskating — I'm being strategic. Vercel's free tier isn't limited. Supabase's free tier isn't limited. Resend's free tier isn't limited. These companies want you to build on their platform and upgrade when you scale. At my current volume, the free tier is genuinely sufficient.

3. One AI, many tools. I don't use 10 different AI products. I use one AI (Claude Code) connected to many tools (via MCP). This means the AI has full context across every brand, every project, every decision. It doesn't have to be re-briefed because it has access to everything.

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Getting Started

If you want to build a similar stack:

• Start with Claude Code. Read my guide. Get comfortable using it for daily tasks before connecting external tools.

• Get the Claude Code Skills Pack ($15). Pre-built skills that give Claude Code superpowers — SEO, design, copywriting, marketing strategy. Get it here.

• Build a brain. The Brain Starter Kit ($27) gives you the knowledge base architecture that makes everything else smarter over time. Get it here.

• Connect one thing. Pick the tool that wastes most of your time and connect it via MCP. Email is usually the best starting point.

• Talk to me. If you want the full stack set up for your business without the two-year learning curve, book a discovery call.

Not sure where to start? The free AI Time-Savings Calculator shows you exactly how many hours you could save with a stack like this — takes 2 minutes.

Stay human, Billy.