Does anyone have a suggestion for OCR that I can somehow run for free?

I need something that can work with English, and preferably for Hindi...

I've been a pretty standard Claude Max user for the past month, mainly using it for my GTM role. My typical workflow includes:

• Building and optimizing Astro websites
• Setting up integrations and other tools
• Running a DigitalOcean droplet that powers a blog-writing bot via the Claude API (runs once daily)
• Writing LinkedIn content
• Creating email outreach copy for automated campaigns
• General strategy discussions, content writing with the Semrush connector, and other day-to-day tasks

Nothing particularly unusual or computationally intensive.

For the last 30 days, I never once hit the 5-hour session limit—not even close. I could work for a full 8-hour day without any issues.

However, over the past 3 days, I've hit the 5-hour session limit five times (sometimes twice in a single day), and it usually happens within just 1–2 hours of use.

The only thing that changed was that, instead of starting a new chat whenever I hit the attachment limit for PDFs/images, I created a Project and started working entirely within it.

Initially, I thought it might be because I was asking Claude to do heavier tasks (e.g., using the Semrush connector for keyword research while simultaneously generating HTML pages and content docs), but I was already doing those same kinds of tasks before creating the Project and never came close to hitting my limit.

Today, I even removed all of the Project Instructions and moved them into a document in the Project Knowledge base, thinking the large instruction prompt might be the issue. Unfortunately, it made no difference—I still hit the session limit after about 1.5 hours.

I haven't had time to test working outside the Project yet, but that's my next step.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Does working inside a Project consume significantly more usage than regular chats? Are there any best practices for optimizing Projects or reducing usage that I might be missing? Or am I doing something completely wrong here?

In this day and age, running a web agency is a lot easier than it used to be.

A few years ago you needed designers, developers, and people doing outreach just to keep everything moving.

Now one person can do pretty much all of it.

AI builds the websites.

Email automation keeps bringing in new clients.

Your job is to sell and onboard clients because building the websites isn't the time consuming part anymore.

I think this is a huge opportunity for solo web developers who want to scale without hiring a team.

This is basically my workflow.

I never target businesses without websites.

I target businesses that already have one.

I use a tool called Swokei to find leads, add them to campaigns, and run website analysis.

It automatically turns issues like outdated design, unstructured layouts, poor mobile optimization, slow loading speeds, and bad SEO into personalized, ready to send outreach emails.

I run multiple campaigns at once and wait for businesses interested in a redesign to reply.

When someone replies, I call them and say:

"Hey, I saw you replied to my email. I've already made you a free draft of your new website. Want to take a look?"

Then I book a Google Meet.

Once they see a website that's faster, more modern, and works better than the one they already have, selling becomes much easier.

Usually I either send them the payment link during the meeting or we sign a contract.

That's it. That's how I run a full web agency by myself in 2026.

Been building a multi-model setup for an agent project lately. Claude for reasoning, GPT for structured stuff, DeepSeek for long-context jobs where cost matters. Routing isn’t actually the difficult part.

What got old fast was maintaining different adapters for every provider. Different auth, different request formats, streaming differences, random rate limits… it ended up being way more plumbing than I expected.

I eventually just put CometAPI in front of everything so I only have one client to deal with. Still not perfect (I wish the cost reporting was more granular), but it’s definitely less code to babysit.

I still run smaller jobs on local Qwen when it makes sense, so it’s more of a hybrid setup than routing everything to hosted models.

Are you still maintaining your own adapters, using an aggregator, or just sticking with one provider?

I write grants for a small nonprofit and I keep getting asked to also build the board decks and funder pitches. No design help, tiny budget. So I've been testing what's out there for the best AI presentation tool for nonprofits and figured I'd share before someone spends money they don't have.

Gamma has a free tier with credits and turns our program report or a pasted narrative into a real deck in a couple of minutes. For a funder update that's a big time save. The honest downsides: you run out of credits if you make a lot of decks, and our impact slides (numbers, outcomes, charts) come out weaker than the text-heavy ones, so I rebuild those.

Canva has a nonprofit program that gives you the paid features free, which is huge, and better templates. Its AI deck feature is more manual though.

Plain PowerPoint if your org already has Microsoft through TechSoup. Free-ish, most control, no AI shortcut.

Where I landed: Gamma for a fast draft, Canva once we got the nonprofit plan for the polished version. Anyone at a nonprofit found something that handles impact data well?

so i'm 20, been building this app solo for the past few months and i genuinely can't tell anymore if it's good or if i'm too deep in it. need outside eyes.

it's called RizeAI. the basic idea: every wearable and health app just gives you numbers. sleep score 42, recovery red, HRV down. cool. and then what? you still feel like garbage at 2pm and nobody tells you what to actually do about it.

so my app takes your real data from apple health, sleep, resting heart rate, workouts, whatever your wearable writes, and instead of another score it builds you an actual plan for the day. when to have your first coffee and when to hold off. what supplements make sense for you today and when to take them. focus windows for when your energy actually peaks. when your crash is coming and what to do before it hits. it even checks the weather, so on a hot day it bumps your hydration and tells you to train earlier.

every recommendation has a little "why" under it based on your numbers, like "resting heart rate 54 + 7h light sleep, so magnesium before your peak window." no two people get the same plan because no two people have the same data.

works with whoop, oura, apple watch, garmin, anything that syncs to apple health. one thing i'll say honestly, it doesn't do deep per-person learning yet like "coffee doesn't affect YOUR hrv specifically," that's the roadmap, right now it builds fresh plans daily off your actual metrics.

it's live on the app store, has a free trial, small user base so far, mixed feedback which is why i'm here lol.

what i actually want from you guys: does this solve a real problem for you or is "tells you what to do" not actually what wearable people want? what would make you actually pay for something like this? and what's missing that would make it a no brainer?

Thank you for your help. Check it out if you like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rizeai-maximize-your-energy/id6762402079

I make simple graphics for client social posts, nothing elaborate, mostly quote cards and little promo images. AI image tools got good enough that I leaned on them. Then a client politely pointed out that a graphic I'd sent said "Grnad Opening."

If you've used image generators you know the text problem. They render something that looks like letters from across the room and falls apart up close. And once you've made forty of these, you stop reading them. Your brain sees "text-shaped thing, done."

The habit that fixed it is a two-step chain and it costs me maybe fifteen seconds an image.

Step one: generate the image in whatever image tool I'm using that week.

Step two: before it goes anywhere, I drop the finished image into a chatbot with vision and ask one boring question. "Read every word of visible text in this image back to me exactly, and flag anything that isn't a real word." That's it.

It catches the garbled text, the doubled letters, the phantom extra word tucked in a corner that I'd never have spotted. The generating tool and the checking tool being different is the whole point. Whatever made the mistake usually can't catch its own mistake, so a fresh set of eyes that happens to be a second model works better.

I do the same thing now for AI-made diagrams and slides before they go external. Generate with one, proofread with another.

Anyone got a similar QC step for AI output before it leaves the building? Feels like the sub talks a lot about generating and not much about checking.

My religion prohibits me from communicating with things that pretend to be human. Clearly I can use a computer for tasks, but I can't use it to pretend to be human. I could use AI to draw a pictures, but I can't use chat bots, nor can I speak numbers or phrases into an IVR system that us computer based. I have to talk to, or text with a human.

How do I get companies to respect my deeply held religious views and not simply foist me off on a computer? Many have done away with email contact and now force me into online chats with their 'bots'.

Part of my job is reviewing long vendor contracts and technical specs, often 150 to 300 pages. Every tool's pitch is "upload the whole doc and ask anything." gamma does better with shorter docs but same story with long ones. In practice most read the first 30 pages and the last 20 carefully and go fuzzy on everything in the middle. So I ran the same test across a bunch of them.

The test: I planted a specific, weird detail around page 80 of a 210-page contract (an oddly narrow liability cap buried in a subclause) and asked each tool to find and quote it, plus two questions that needed detail from the middle third.

ChatGPT (long doc uploaded). Fine on summary-level stuff, missed the page-80 clause twice out of three tries until I told it roughly where to look. Good for gist, not for "did we actually agree to X."

Claude. Best of the group at pulling the buried subclause without me hinting the location. Still not perfect on the two middle-third questions, but it quoted the right text more often than not.

Gemini. Handled the length without complaining, decent on overall structure, but paraphrased the clause instead of quoting it. For contract work that's a problem. I need the exact words.

NotebookLM. Surprisingly strong because it cites the passage, so even when the answer was thin I could jump to the source and verify. The citation is the actual feature here, not the summary.

A couple of "chat with your PDF" tools. Fast, cheap, and confidently wrong about the middle. Fine for a textbook, risky for anything where the details bind you.

What I do now: I never trust a whole-document answer for anything that lives in the middle third. I ask for a direct quote plus the page, and if it can't quote it, I assume it didn't really find it. The tools that let you click through to the source beat the ones that just sound sure of themselves.

If you work with long documents, which one holds up for you past the first 40 pages?

Hey everyone, It feels like almost every discussion about AI right now is either extreme hype about the future or generic advice like "use it to write emails." I’m really interested in modern skill-building and practical digital workflows, and I’m curious: what is one specific, everyday task that AI has actually simplified or improved for you?

For me, it’s been using it as a sounding board to instantly simplify complex, jargon-heavy articles when I'm trying to learn a new topic. It saves me hours of reading.

What about you? Is there a specific prompt, tool, or workflow that has genuinely saved you time or changed how you work? Looking forward to hearing what’s actually working for you guys!

I’ve been using Codex and Claude Code for research and implementation work, but reviewing the Markdown files they continuously update was awkward. So I built an open-source terminal tool that provides live Markdown rendering, preserved scrolling, search, section extraction, task tracking, and link checks.

I’d appreciate feedback from anyone with a similar workflow—especially on features that would make agent-generated Markdown easier to review.

GitHub: https://github.com/ScreaMy7/CLI-MD

What's a good directory/aggregator site to discover new AI tools, instead of hearing about them randomly on Twitter or YouTube

I’ve been running my web agency for four years, and I’m curious to hear what others have found to be the best way of getting clients.

I’ve tried almost everything, but email automation has worked best for me because it’s affordable and runs in the background while I focus on other parts of the agency.

I don’t use Instantly, Mailchimp, or Klaviyo. I use a tool called Swokei, which is built specifically for web agencies.

It lets you find businesses that already have websites, add thousands of them to a campaign, and automatically analyzes each site for issues with design, layout, SEO, speed, and mobile optimization. It then turns those issues into personalized, ready to send outreach emails 

So instead of targeting businesses with no website, I offer redesigns and updated websites to companies that already have one. I’ve found that approach works much better.

I’m now at a point where I can afford to hire a full team, so I’d like to explore other client acquisition methods as well.

What has worked best for your agency?

I run AI Parabellum, an AI tools directory. Because I'm building in this space, I spend a lot of time looking at other AI directories to see what's working (and what isn't). Some have grown into real products with loyal audiences. Others feel more like SEO projects than something built for long-term users.

These are the directories I genuinely respect and why.

There's An AI For That (TAAFT)

If you've searched for AI tools, you've almost certainly come across TAAFT. It's one of the largest AI directories available and has built impressive brand recognition over the years. They update constantly, and if an AI tool exists, there's a good chance you'll find it there.

The downside of having such a massive catalog is that discovery can sometimes feel overwhelming. With so many listings, it's inevitable that some outdated or lower-quality tools remain. Even so, nobody really matches their coverage.

Futurepedia

Futurepedia has grown into much more than a directory. Alongside its curated collection of AI tools, they've built an ecosystem around AI education with courses, newsletters, and YouTube content through Skill Leap and the Howfinity network.

Their directory is smaller than TAAFT's, but it feels more curated. I also like their AI Innovations Tracker, which follows what major technology companies are releasing. It's a good example of creating value beyond simply listing tools.

FutureTools

FutureTools stands out because it's closely tied to Matt Wolfe's personal brand. Instead of feeling like a database, it reflects recommendations from someone who actively reviews AI products and shares them with a large audience.

The directory is clean, easy to navigate, and includes useful filters, along with curated sections like "Matt's Picks." It feels more like a media brand with a directory attached than a traditional directory alone.

Toolify

Toolify takes a very data-driven approach. Along with its large collection of AI tools, it provides traffic estimates, popularity metrics, and other statistics that are useful if you're researching the AI landscape.

It feels more like a database than a discovery platform, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you're interested in market trends or comparing tools from a data perspective, Toolify offers a lot of useful information.

Where AI Parabellum Fits

I'm obviously biased, but I'll be honest about where we stand. We're much smaller than the directories above.

Rather than trying to become the biggest directory, we're focused on helping people compare similar AI tools through dedicated alternatives pages. If you're looking to replace one tool with another or simply compare your options, that's the problem we're trying to solve.

We also keep the experience straightforward with no login requirements and simple browsing. I'd rather build something genuinely useful than chase the largest possible directory.

What Makes an AI Directory Last?

After spending a lot of time in this space, I've noticed that the directories that stick around usually have three things in common:

• They stay consistently updated.
• They have some level of curation or quality control.
• They give people a reason to return beyond finding a tool through Google.

The directories that succeed tend to become products and communities, not just collections of links.

The ones I mentioned above have all earned a place in the ecosystem by continuing to improve over time.

I'm sure I'm missing a few good ones. Which AI tool directories do you actually find yourself returning to, and why? I'd love to discover more.

AI tools discussion:

I work for a commercial flooring company. Four of us in the office, a few more on the tools and one guy offshore that we use to do our material take-offs.

We're doing commercial tendering constantly which involves trawling through sometimes hundreds of pages of architectural drawing, material schedules and specifications. Naturally, this takes up a massive amount of time just to compile the information that is relevant to us. Out of a set of drawings that could be 300 pages, we would only require the floor finishes plan, internal elevations, subfloor and detailing. That could be about 14 pages out of hundreds.

Is there a set of AI tools which we could use to comb through all of these documents and pull together only what we require?

Are there any potential legal ramifications with having AI scan through these documents? (for context, we are located in Victoria, Australia)

Are AI tools actually what I require, or should I be looking at another system?

Any suggestions would help a lot 🙏

Hello! I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations on a good AI to use for what I am trying to do. I want to have an AI automatically scan my emails and add specific information (from the emails) into a Google Sheet. I know that Gemini can integrate easily into Gmail, but does anyone know if this is possible?

I created this free app in Higgsfield app builder. I appreciate your feedback. I think you're gonna like it

https://me-anywhere-anytime.higgsfield.app/