I tested 50 AI tools in May - the 7 I kept

I Tested 50 AI Tools in May. Here Are the 7 I Actually Kept. By day 18 of May I had 34 browser tabs open, six half-finished integrations, and a $600 API bill I could not fully explain. I had set a simple rule at the start of the month: spin up every AI tool that crossed my feed, run it on a real workflow I own, and cut anything that did not survive contact with actual work. Not demos. Not onboarding videos. Real tasks — code review, customer research, content pipelines, data extraction, intern...