Hear ye, hear ye: who runs this place
Every village needs a herald: the one person standing in the square with a scroll, shouting the news so everyone else can get back to farming. The AI realm has a few thousand new tools a month and, as far as we can tell, no herald. Just a lot of "Top 10 AI Tools" listicles written by an AI tool, about AI tools, for the benefit of nobody.
Solos Gems is the herald. It's an AI tools database with a Dungeons and Dragons problem: every tool gets a plain-English summary of what it actually does, a retro video game comic about it, and a caption that is either a clever observation or a cheap shot, depending on how the dice landed. It started as a review site for one-person businesses. Then it kept leveling up and multiclassed into a database, a news crier, a graveyard, a world map, and a text adventure game. We regret nothing.
The Herald's Hub
The homepage is the main event: 252 AI tools sorted into categories, searchable by name, filterable by pricing, and sortable however your heart desires. Hover a tile on the wall for the quick lore, or scroll the list for the full row. Every tool links straight to the real product, no detour through a review page you didn't ask for.
Up top there's a headline ticker crying the latest AI news, and the Crystal Ball, which peers into GitHub to see which AI projects are suddenly gaining followers. Fortune telling, but with stars that can be counted.
How we rank
Every one of the 252 tools in the database now has a rank, a score out of 10, and a one-line note from the Herald on why it landed where it did. The score is the plain average of four equally weighted stats: value relative to price, real-world capability, ease of use and setup friction, and how safely you can try it (a generous free tier beats "pay first, find out later"). Nothing scores a 10. If a tool were flawless, it would not need a ranking, it would need a bard.
Each tool also wears one of two labels, so you always know how the dice were rolled:
- Tested: 51 tools we have used hands-on, with real accounts and real workflows.
- Scouted: everything else, scored from the vendor's public pricing, documentation, and feature lists rather than hands-on use. Scouted scores are informed estimates, and a scouted tool can be promoted to Tested once we've put it through the gauntlet.
The ranking is one list across every category, not a pile of per-category leaderboards, so a design tool can outrank a bookkeeping tool if it delivers more for the money. Because the criteria favor value and a safe way to try things, enterprise-only tools priced for big companies land near the bottom even when they're excellent, which is the point: this list is for people spending their own gold. When a tool is added or a score is revised, everyone's position gets recalculated. Prices and features change constantly, so always confirm the current price on the vendor's site before you hand over gold.
Other corners of the realm
Realms is a live D&D style world map of real AI activity by country: news coverage, search interest from Wikipedia pageviews, and build activity on GitHub. Click a region to read its quest log.
DeathStack is the graveyard: 35 real AI tools and services that shut down, what killed them, and the lesson for anyone building on a single vendor. Some of them raised hundreds of millions of dollars first. Rest in pieces.
News is the herald's full scroll: headlines pulled automatically from real outlets, each with a short, nerdy summary, flagged for controversy and for anything that mentions a tool in the database.
The Road to Solos Gems (the 🎲 Quest badge by the logo) is a choose-your-own-adventure storygame. Build a character across eight AI flavored abilities and watch your build change the story. The goal is to reach the gems. Roll well.
Submit is where you tell us about a tool we missed, or nominate a fallen one for the graveyard.
The data behind this site
The full database is free to grab as JSON or CSV, ranks and scores included, with attribution. The State of AI Tools page crunches the ranked list into medians and free-tier rates, and if you run a blog you can embed the top 10 for free.
Herald quests and the D&D rules
The Herald's quests are a D&D-style game run by an AI Dungeon Master. Its rules knowledge includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2 ("SRD 5.2") and 5.1 ("SRD 5.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2 and SRD 5.1 are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License; we condensed them into a short reference. The Herald's deck of twists, characters, odd items and old legends, and its DM Codex of game-running advice from every era of the hobby, are our own writing, inspired by the quest shapes of public-domain myth, folklore and romance. Solos Gems is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast.
Affiliate disclosure
Some links on this site are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. That never changes which tools get listed, how they're ranked, or what the comic says about them. A tool with no affiliate program gets roasted exactly as hard as one that pays 30% recurring.
Get in touch
Corrections, a tool we missed, or a strongly held opinion about who deserves #1: casterej@yahoo.com. The herald reads every scroll.