I Tried 500+ AI Tools, These 6 Will Make You Serious Money

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Over the last few months, I've tested over 500 AI tools. And out of all of them, only six are actually making people serious money in 2026. Because here's the thing, most people are actually losing more money on AI subscriptions than they ever [music] make back. So, in this video, I'm breaking down the six that actually move the needle. Some of these will directly make us money, while others will save us so much time. It's basically the same thing. And at the very end, we're going to combine three of them to build something most people don't even realize is possible yet. But a quick heads up before we dive in. A lot of the video and image work we're doing today runs through a platform called Higsfield. I personally use it because it has every major image and video model in one place which saves us from juggling five different subscriptions. So if you want to follow along the links in the description along with all the prompts used throughout the video, which brings us to our first tool, Higsfield Cedance 2.0. This is the model that's quietly taken over as the dominant format for marketing in 2026. AI generated ads. No more hiring expensive actors. No more booking studios. No more spending days in post-prouction. With Cance 2.0, we can generate ultra realistic user generated style ads that look completely authentic. The kind that stops people midscroll. Here's how the workflow looks. Once we're logged into Higsfield, we'll select video [music] and in the models column, click Seance 2.0. Then we'll click upload media and on the right side, hit image generations. I already generated a character earlier, so we're going to select the first one here since the label on the creatine gummies is clear and the lighting works perfectly for the ad. Next, we'll set duration to 15 seconds, aspect ratio to 3x4, and quality to 1080p. And finally, we just paste our prompt. And here's the result we got.

[00:01:43][music] >> [music] >> Here's another one I generated with the same character, but instead of a trendy audio, I prompted her to do a review style take on the product.

[00:02:00]>> Okay. Why does this actually look kind of good? Wait, these look like candy, but they're actually creatine. Okay, hold on. Wait, [music] what?

[00:02:09]Why is that actually good? I thought creatine was like powder or something.

[00:02:13]Yeah, I'd actually take these every day.

[00:02:15]>> With just the simple steps I showed, we can create hundreds of these UGC ads per day to use for affiliate marketing, drop shipping, or even to promote our own brand, all for just a fraction of what it usually costs traditionally. If you're running an e-commerce store or drop shipping brand, this is the single most powerful tool you can add to your workflow right now. But here's where it gets interesting. Higsfield isn't just for ads. Keep watching because later we're going to combine it with another tool to build something most agencies charge thousands of dollars for. So, if Higsfield is our creative playground, our next tool is where the serious building happens. It's called Google AI Studio, and it gives us direct access to Google's most powerful models all in one place. Their flagship language model, Gemini 3.1 Pro, their image generator, Nano Banana Pro, and their video model, VO3.1. Think of it as a professional-grade lab where we can test ideas, generate assets, and build custom workflows at a scale that just wasn't possible a year ago. Now, a quick thing to clarify. Google AI Studio is built for experimenting with these models directly. If we want to take them and instantly turn them into fully deployed web apps without touching a single line of code, that's where our third tool comes in. But for content creation and character design, Google AI Studio is genuinely one of the most underrated tools out there right now. And here's where it gets fun. We're going to use this tool right now to build something we'll come back to at the end of the video. Stay with me because this one ties everything together. We're going to create our very own faceless YouTube influencer. A fully AI generated character that can front an entire channel without us ever stepping in front of a camera. Here's how it works.

[00:03:45][music] Once we're inside Google AI Studio, we'll select image generation and click on Nano Banana Pro. On the right hand side, we can modify our settings. For this character, we'll set the aspect ratio to 16x9 and resolution to 4K. Then, we'll paste in our character prompt. For this example, we're launching a history channel. So, we're going to design our history teacher influencer. And just like that, [music] our character is born. We'll name him Minho. Minho is going to be the face of our entire channel. But here's the problem. A static image isn't going to get us millions of views. We need to bring him to life. We need him talking, teaching, and carrying full videos on his own. And that's exactly what we're going to do later using tool number six.

[00:04:22]For now, just remember this face. But content isn't the only opportunity AI is opening up right now. If Google AI Studio helps us create, this next tool helps us build. It's called Clawed Code, and it's the closest thing we have right now to hiring a full-time developer for free. Here's the simplest way to think about it. Most AI tools can write code for us, but we still have to copy it, paste it somewhere, and figure out how to run it. Claude Code is different. It builds the entire app for us end to end [music] with nothing more than a prompt.

[00:04:49]To prove it, we're going to build a real working product right now. a web app that rates our AI business ideas across three different criteria and tells us whether they're actually worth [music] pursuing. And the best part, we're setting it up so users have to pay before they can see their score. Here's the workflow. We'll head over to claude.ai, open up a new chat, and paste in our prompt. Now, watch this. Claude is building the entire app on its own right now. The landing page, the scoring logic, the payw wall, the results screen, all of it. And we're not even writing a single line of code. A couple of minutes later, we have a fully working app live inside our browser. So, let's test this thing out. We'll drop in a sample business idea. Let's go with an AI tool that writes dating profiles and hit rate my idea. But here's where this starts looking like a real business.

[00:05:29]Before the score loads, the user hits a payw wall. They pay $5 and then the score reveals. In under 5 minutes, we built a full software product. Clean [music] design, real scoring powered by Claude, a working payw wall. All the pieces of a real business already in place. Because the same workflow we [music] just used can be copy pasted into dozens of other products. AI ré graders that charge job seekers 10 bucks a pop. niche tools built for specific industries like real estate, fitness, or law. Lead magnets for our email list that capture thousands of subscribers on autopilot. Even paid Chrome extensions that run in the background and charge a monthly fee. Every one of these can be built in an afternoon. And if we pick the right problem and put it in front of the right people, this is exactly the kind of setup [music] that makes us money while we sleep. Building products is powerful, but if we're serious about moving fast in 2026, we also need to speed up the small things we do every single day. That's where tool number four comes in. Now, this next one won't make us money directly, but it'll save us so much time, it practically [music] pays for itself. It's called Whisper Flow, and it's a dictation tool that lets us hold down a hotkey and just speak to our computer. To activate it, we hold control plus Windows on Windows or function on Mac. And if our hands are busy, we can hit hotkey plus space for full hands-free mode. But here's what actually makes this different from every other dictation tool on the market. It's not just transcribing what we say, it's actively editing as we speak. It strips out our ums and likes, fixes mid-sentence corrections, and autopunctuates everything for us. So, if I say, "Send it Tuesday, wait, make it Thursday," it just writes Thursday. We can also highlight any block of text and say, "Make [music] this more professional or turn this into bullet points." And it just does it. And it works inside literally any app. Emails, code editors, YouTube scripts, chat, GPT, it doesn't matter. It types three to [music] four times faster than we can manually. And I genuinely use this every single day. And once you start, it's almost impossible to go back. If you're producing any kind of written output at scale, this is the fastest productivity upgrade you can make today. If tool number four helps us work faster, tool number five helps us think faster. This tool solves a problem every creator and entrepreneur deals with information overload. It's called Notebook LM, and it's basically our personal always research assistant. We can upload pretty much anything. Long PDFs, research papers, YouTube links, massive data sets, and it instantly processes all of it for us. It can summarize everything, build study guides, draft presentation notes, and generate Q&A sessions straight from our source material. But its best feature, and the one I keep coming back to, is something called audio overviews. It generates a fully realistic conversational podcast based entirely on the sources we give it.

[00:07:59]Let's say we want to stay up to date with AI and learn the latest news for March 2026. To do this, inside Notebook LM, we'll click create new and in the search box, type in AI news for March 2026. Once it finishes searching, we'll click import and select audio. From here, we can customize our podcast exactly the way we want it. In this case, we'll set the style to deep dive, language [music] to English, and leave length on default. We also want our AI host to focus on business and strategy.

[00:08:26]Once we're happy with it, we hit generate. And in just a few minutes, we have a full podcast walking us through the latest updates in the AI space.

[00:08:33]>> Right now, major tech companies are quietly firing their entry-level software developers. And it's not to save money. It's actually to afford the exact AI infrastructure that is actively replacing them.

[00:08:46]>> Yeah, it's a massive shift. So instead of spending hours reading articles online, we can just search a topic here or drop in a PDF and listen to a full breakdown on our commute. For client research, course creation, or just staying sharp on fastmoving topics like AI, this tool is genuinely hard to beat.

[00:09:03]Now, saving time is great, but our final tool is the one that ties this entire video together, and it's how we're finally going to bring our history teacher to life. This last setup is the one that unlocks everything. We're combining Hijen with the character we already built inside Google AI Studio.

[00:09:17]Here's the play. Remember our history teacher, Minho, from earlier? We're going to drop him straight into Hijen.

[00:09:22]Inside Hen, we'll click create your AI avatar. From there, we toggle create a virtual character and click upload photo. Next, we'll click select photos and upload the reference image we generated earlier. And from there, Hen animates the face, syncs the mouth movements, and we can even clone a voice to match his vibe. Now that our character is ready, we can start generating videos of him talking. On the lefthand side, we'll click avatar and select use in video. From here, we can paste in a script of whatever we want him to say. In this case, we'll have him introduce himself.

[00:09:50]>> Hi, I'm Minho, history teacher. And no, I won't put you to sleep because here's the truth they never told you in school.

[00:09:59]History is basically reality TV with swords. Betrayals, chaos, bad decisions by powerful idiots who somehow ran entire civilizations.

[00:10:10]Kings poisoning their own brothers.

[00:10:12]Emperors declaring war because they got insulted at dinner. Entire empires collapsing because one guy refused to read the room. You think your group chat has drama? Try 3,000 years of it.

[00:10:24]>> And just like that, our static character is now a fully talking on camera host.

[00:10:28]These talking head videos can go up to 30 minutes each and can be exported at full 1080p quality. So yeah, we could genuinely run entire YouTube channels with Hey Gen alone. But here's the thing, a talking head by itself isn't going to hold anyone's attention for more than a minute or two. To make this feel like a real high retention YouTube video, we need to mix in cinematic B-rolls. And that's where Cance 2.0 inside Higsfield comes back in.

[00:10:50]Egyptians built pyramids without cranes or tutorials. Meanwhile, we've got AI that builds entire YouTube channels. And here's the twist. I'm not even real.

[00:11:03]This whole thing 100% AI. Samurai trained decades to master one craft. You just need three tools. Nano banana, hen, seed dance. Character, voice, cinematic world. Done. That's how I'm standing here right now. Every empire fell because someone didn't adapt. AI is the new printing press and we're early. The ones starting now, they win. So don't be Rome. Start your channel.

[00:11:35]>> This is the exact combo I teased at the very start of the video. Ancient Egypt, feudal Japan, the fall of Rome. Full cinematic scenes generated in minutes.

[00:11:44]No camera, no studio, no face. And this exact style of content is doing absurd numbers right now. Not just on YouTube.

[00:11:50]Take Young Munis on Instagram for example. He uses a consistent AI avatar to pull millions of views every single month and makes thousands selling a single ebook off the back of it. We can monetize the exact same way. YouTube AdSense, affiliate deals, or our own digital products. The infrastructure is already here. We [music] just have to build it. So, there you have it. Six AI tools that are actually making people serious money in 2026. But here's the catch. Most people are going to watch this video, feel inspired for about 10 minutes, and then do absolutely nothing with it. And I get it because every tool we just covered costs money. And for a lot of us starting out, dropping subscriptions on six different platforms [music] isn't realistic. Which is why I spent 2 weeks testing every single free AI video generator I could find. And you can click the video on screen now to see me break it all