Every week we publish what changed across the 1,709 AI tools we have scored, plus a handful worth your attention. This is the issue for Oct 6 - Oct 12, 2026, archived here in full.
What we published
Otter.ai Alternatives in 2026: Keep Otter Pro’s 1,200 Minutes a Month for $79.99 a Year Instead of $99.96, or Pay $0 If Every Meeting Is a Video Call
Otter Pro's 1,200 minutes a month cost $99.96 a year; HyNote Pro gives the same 1,200 for $79.99 ($11.99 vs $16.99 monthly). Online-only? Fathom Free is $0. Prices checked 10 October 2026.
Self-Hosting AI Image Models for a Small Business in 2026: Which Weights You Can Sell Without a Licence Fee, and When a $0.27 GPU Beats the API
For a small business self-hosting image generation, the licence decides more of the bill than the GPU. FLUX.2 [klein] 4B is Apache-2.0 and free to sell from; its 9B sibling, FLUX.2 [dev] and FLUX.1 [dev] are non-commercial. Stability AI and Midjourney both end "free" at exactly $1,000,000 of revenue. A $0.27 Runpod A5000 beats the $0.014 API image only above 19.3 images an hour. Every figure read on 25 September 2026.
Fine-Tuning an LLM in 2026: The Same 30-Million-Token Run Bills $12 or $90, and One Platform Google Recommends Has Redirected Its Whole Domain to Another Company
A LoRA supervised fine-tune of gpt-oss-20B on 30 million training tokens bills $12.00 on Together AI and $90.00 on Fireworks AI, because one prices per model and the other prices in parameter bands with a six-fold step at 16 billion. Of the managed platforms Google names, Predibase now redirects its whole domain to another company and OpenAI has closed fine-tuning to new users. The same H100 hour runs $1.99 to $8.00. Every figure read on 18 September 2026.
Best Open Source LLM Serving Stacks in 2026: Hugging Face Archived TGI and Named Its Replacements, and One Identical Model Bills $0.17 or $0.95 per Million Output Tokens Depending on Who Runs It
Hugging Face archived text-generation-inference, the stack Google still ranks fourth for this query, and its README now points at vLLM and SGLang. Then we priced one identical open-weight model across every provider publishing a rate on 17 September 2026: $0.17 to $0.95 per million output tokens, and at the one rate 8 of them share, throughput runs 15 to 259 tokens a second. The same H100 hour runs $2.89 to $8.00.
Self-Hosted vs Managed Vector Search in 2026: What a RAG Team’s First Million Vectors Really Costs, $76 to $400 a Month, and Why Every Advertised Per-Vector Rate Is a Full-Capacity Rate
All five managed vector services Google names, each asked through its own pricing calculator on 16 September 2026 for the same one million 768-dimensional vectors. The answers ran $50 to $400 a month. Every advertised per-vector rate turns out to be a full-capacity rate: the cluster type Zilliz advertises at $5 per million returns $189.44, the dearest of its three. Reads are 99.7 percent of a real search bill and storage is 0.2 percent. Qdrant Cloud still publishes no rate on its pricing page; its calculator says $76.48.
New to the catalogue
- Agent Skills (AI Coding, scored 7.7)
- OpenCodeReview (AI Agents, scored 7.4)
- VoiceStudio (Voice Generation, scored 7.4)
- Codex CLI (AI Coding, scored 7.2)
- LiveKit (AI Video, scored 7.2)
- OpenHuman (AI Agents, scored 7.2)
- AirLLM (LLM Infrastructure, scored 6.8)
- Cua (AI Agents, scored 6.7)
Five worth your time
| Tool | Category | Score |
|---|---|---|
| LangChain | AI Agents | 8.4/10 |
| SiteSpeakAI | AI Assistant | 8.3/10 |
| Supabase | AI Coding | 8/10 |
| CrawlRaven | SEO | 8/10 |
| RewriteBar | Productivity | 8/10 |
LangChain. The agent engineering platform.
SiteSpeakAI. Train your AI agent on your site, docs, PDFs, and videos. It captures leads, books meetings, looks up orders, and escalates the rest. 95+ languages. One line of code.
Supabase. The Postgres development platform. Supabase gives you a dedicated Postgres database to build your web, mobile, and AI applications.
CrawlRaven. CrawlRaven joins Search Console, GA4, and your Ahrefs or Semrush lists to a 200-point crawl: what to write, what to update, what to fix first. Free for one site.
RewriteBar. RewriteBar is a macOS AI writing assistant. Fix grammar, translate to 500+ languages, and enhance your writing in any app with AI-powered actions.
The honest limit
Our score for each of the 1,709 tools measures what a careful reader can check: public pricing, documentation, maintenance, and for open source the GitHub record. It does not measure whether a tool is pleasant to use or right for you. How the score works.
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