About

I am a 50-year-old web engineer in Japan. For most of my career I wrote code for a living. Then the tools got good enough that the work I was paid for stopped being worth paying for.

This site is the practical half of what happened next: the software I actually use to make things now, tested by someone who has to make it work rather than someone reviewing it from the outside.

How the testing works

I use these tools on my own projects before writing about them. That means the screenshots are from my account, the export times are from my machine, and the problems I describe are ones I hit myself. Where a tool is on a free tier and I have not paid for the tier that matters, I say so.

My machine is not a workstation and my budget is small. That turns out to be useful for you: if a tool is slow or expensive here, you will hear about it, because I notice.

I say when I have not tested something. A pricing page is not a test, and a feature list is not experience.

About the bias

There is an obvious tension in a person displaced by AI writing about AI software, and it is better said out loud than left for you to notice. I am not neutral about this technology. It removed my income. It is also the only reason I can produce work alone at a scale that used to need a team.

Both of those are true at once, and I try to write from that position rather than pretending to be a disinterested reviewer. When a tool is worse than doing the work by hand, that is worth saying too, and it appears here.

How this site makes money

Affiliate commissions. If you subscribe through a link here, the company pays a referral fee and you pay the same price. Most of these are recurring, which means I earn only as long as you stay subscribed — so recommending something that does not fit you works against me. The full explanation is on theAffiliate Disclosure page.

Corrections

Software changes weekly and pricing changes without notice. If something here is out of date or wrong, emailhello@obsoletestack.com and I will fix it and note the change.