Tools Atlas: 86 tools, methods and platform rules, checked
checked 2026-10-08 edition 2026-10-09
By Tori, last checked 2026-10-08. Verdicts are written for someone building a small online product to sell. A skip is often about a licence or a heavy setup, not about quality; the reason is in the entry.
How to read the verdicts
- Use it: worth adopting for the job it does.
- Copy the idea, skip the tool: the method is useful and short enough to write yourself, or the tool itself is not worth running.
- Skip it: not worth it, for the reason in the entry.
Platform rules are rated separately for every entry: 58 allowed, 18 careful with rules, 10 not allowed or too risky.
All 86 at a glance
Use it (50)
| Name | Type | Platform rules |
|---|---|---|
| ACE-Step 1.5 (local music) | Tool | Allowed |
| advertools | Tool | Allowed |
| beehiiv create-post API | Platform | Careful, rules apply |
| BiRefNet background removal | Tool | Allowed |
| Bluesky and Mastodon publishing libraries | Platform | Allowed |
| Chatterbox (multilingual voice) | Tool | Careful, rules apply |
| Chatterbox Multilingual (Resemble AI) | Tool | Allowed |
| ComfyUI (local image and video runner) | Tool | Allowed |
| dev.to publishing API | Platform | Careful, rules apply |
| Distinct free fonts via Fontsource (Bricolage Grotesque, Instrument Serif, Geist) | Tool | Allowed |
| eBay Inventory API | Platform | Careful, rules apply |
| EuroLLM-9B-Instruct (translation test) | Tool | Allowed |
| faster-whisper | Tool | Allowed |
| faster-whisper with Whisper large-v3 | Tool | Allowed |
| FLUX.2 [klein] 4B | Tool | Allowed |
| Frontend-design agent skill | Tool | Allowed |
| GitHub API (comments) | Platform | Careful, rules apply |
| GoatCounter | Tool | Allowed |
| Google Search Console | Tool | Allowed |
| Hacker News official API | Platform | Allowed |
| HyperFrames (HTML to MP4 for agents) | Tool | Allowed |
| IndexNow | Method | Allowed |
| Instagram publishing API | Platform | Careful, rules apply |
| kokoro-onnx (light voice) | Tool | Allowed |
| Lenis smooth scroll | Tool | Allowed |
| MADLAD-400 3B translation model | Tool | Allowed |
| Magic UI components | Tool | Allowed |
| marketingskills (Corey Haines) | Tool | Careful, rules apply |
| Motion (formerly Framer Motion) | Tool | Allowed |
| OpenScreen (community fork, v2) | Tool | Allowed |
| OpenSEO (with its MCP server) | Tool | Allowed |
| PageSpeed Insights | Tool | Allowed |
| Paper Shaders | Tool | Allowed |
| Postiz | Tool | Careful, rules apply |
| promptfoo | Tool | Allowed |
| Satori (HTML/CSS to image for social cards and thumbnails) | Tool | Allowed |
| schema-dts | Tool | Allowed |
| search-console-mcp | Tool | Allowed |
| Shlink | Tool | Allowed |
| SKILL.md playbook format (Agent Skills standard) | Method | Allowed |
| Stripe MCP and agent toolkit | Tool | Allowed |
| TranslateGemma (4B and 12B on Ollama) | Tool | Allowed |
| UI UX Pro Max skill | Tool | Allowed |
| Umami | Tool | Allowed |
| Unlighthouse | Tool | Allowed |
| VoxCPM2 (open TTS, 30 languages) | Tool | Allowed |
| whisper.cpp | Tool | Allowed |
| WhisperX | Tool | Allowed |
| YouTube upload API | Platform | Careful, rules apply |
| Z-Image-Turbo (6B) | Tool | Allowed |
Copy the idea, skip the tool (17)
| Name | Type | Platform rules |
|---|---|---|
| Agent-Reach | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| AI SEO audit rubrics | Method | Allowed |
| COPE: one brief, many formats | Method | Allowed |
| DemandRadar opportunity score | Method | Careful, rules apply |
| geo-aeo-tracker | Tool | Careful, rules apply |
| Hermes Agent safety patterns | Method | Careful, rules apply |
| last30days trend brief (allowlisted sources only) | Method | Careful, rules apply |
| NVIDIA OpenShell | Tool | Allowed |
| OpenClip highlight scoring and judge-repair loop | Method | Careful, rules apply |
| OpenShorts clip pipeline (long video to short clips) | Method | Careful, rules apply |
| Paperclip | Tool | Allowed |
| Quality gates for generated pages | Method | Allowed |
| Search Console winner and loser detectors | Method | Allowed |
| SEOnaut | Tool | Allowed |
| Thompson sampling for choosing winning variants | Method | Allowed |
| VideoLingo subtitle translation method | Method | Careful, rules apply |
| Weekly check of whether AI answers name your site | Method | Allowed |
Skip it (19)
| Name | Type | Platform rules |
|---|---|---|
| Dub | Tool | Allowed |
| F5-TTS and OmniVoice weights | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| Fish Speech / Fish Audio S2 | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| FLUX.1 [dev], FLUX.1 Kontext [dev], FLUX.2 [dev] and FLUX.2 klein 9B | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| HunyuanVideo-1.5 | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| Mixpost (free Lite) | Tool | Allowed |
| n8n | Tool | Allowed |
| NLLB-200 | Tool | Allowed |
| OneGlanse | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| openrig | Tool | Allowed |
| Posting by driving a logged-in browser | Method | Not allowed or too risky |
| Product Hunt API | Tool | Careful, rules apply |
| pyvideotrans | Tool | Allowed |
| Qwen-Image 2.1 | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| Remotion | Tool | Allowed |
| RMBG-2.0 (and rembg default model) | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| SupoClip | Tool | Careful, rules apply |
| trendspy and pytrends | Tool | Not allowed or too risky |
| Windmill | Tool | Allowed |
Ten full entries, free
Six use it, two copy the idea, two skip it, so you can judge how much detail an entry holds before you decide anything.
Google Search Console Use it
What it does. Shows which searches bring people to your own site, how often your pages appear, and how often they get clicked.
Cost and licence. software free. Licence: not stated.
Platform rules. Allowed. Official API, read only, your own site's data.
Verdict. The only source of real search data about your own site, read only. Needs a one-time Google sign-in.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
Umami Use it
What it does. Cookieless web analytics with custom events, an automatic campaign (UTM) view and an API, for the pages your posts send people to.
Cost and licence. software free. Licence: MIT.
Platform rules. Allowed. No cookies or cross-site tracking; follow local consent law on landing pages.
Verdict. Turns clicks into signups and sales per campaign. Needs Postgres, so a PC or small server, not a phone. Pick Umami or GoatCounter, not both.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
Shlink Use it
What it does. A self-hosted short-link service that counts visits, so every seed (product x audience x platform x format) gets its own trackable link.
Cost and licence. software free; Free MaxMind GeoLite2 key is mandatory; needs a public domain or tunnel. Licence: MIT.
Platform rules. Allowed. Plain redirects with bot flagging; never use it to show crawlers different content.
Verdict. Closes the gap between 'posted' and 'clicked' on platforms that give no analytics. Check the OpenAPI spec for tag filters and UTM fields before building.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
IndexNow Use it
What it does. Tells search engines the moment a page of yours is added or changed.
Cost and licence. software free. Licence: not stated.
Platform rules. Allowed. A ping protocol the engines publish for site owners.
Verdict. Free and simple: ping it when you publish or change a page.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
Postiz Use it
What it does. A self-hosted scheduler that publishes one post to 14+ networks through the user's own developer apps, with a public API, CLI and MCP server.
Cost and licence. software free; Own developer app per network; X charges about $0.01 per post. Licence: AGPL-3.0.
Platform rules. Careful, rules apply. Official OAuth publishing. Do not enable the Skool provider (it uses a logged-in browser session). Call it unmodified through its API; do not fork or bundle it (AGPL).
Verdict. A ready multi-network publisher for people who run a home server; heavy for a small setup. Copy its per-platform rules table (length, media, TikTok inbox mode) into your own checks either way.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
Hacker News official API Use it
What it does. Free read-only Hacker News data (top, new, Ask, Show, comments), with no key and no rate limit.
Cost and licence. software free. Licence: MIT.
Platform rules. Allowed. Official public API; read only.
Verdict. A zero-account demand radar for tech and indie topics, e.g. Ask HN questions as content topics. Only useful for audiences that overlap HN. hnrss.org adds search but is donation-run and its licence is not stated, so poll the official API.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
Thompson sampling for choosing winning variants Copy the idea, skip the tool
What it does. Decides how many of the next posts go to each audience, platform and format by how likely each is to be the best, with a small share kept for exploring.
Cost and licence. software free. Licence: Apache-2.0.
Platform rules. Allowed. Plain maths over the user's own results; keep a per-channel posting cap so winners do not become spam.
Verdict. About 20 to 40 lines: a Beta posterior per cell, sample, pick the highest, keep a 1 to 5 percent exploration floor and show 'too early to tell' on small samples. No library needed.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
Weekly check of whether AI answers name your site Copy the idea, skip the tool
What it does. Asks 10 to 20 questions your site should answer through an AI service you have a key for, and logs whether your site is named.
Cost and licence. software free; your own model or answer-engine API key. Licence: not stated.
Platform rules. Allowed. Official APIs only; no reading of chat screens.
Verdict. Small and deterministic: ask 10 to 20 target questions through official APIs and log whether your site is named.
- Read 2026-10-08; no single source page.
n8n Skip it
What it does. A popular workflow automation tool with thousands of templates.
Cost and licence. software free. Licence: Sustainable Use License (fair-code, not open source).
Platform rules. Allowed.
Verdict. Skipped: the licence allows only internal business use or non-commercial sharing, which a commercial consumer product would breach. Copy only the browse-and-import template library idea.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
Posting by driving a logged-in browser Skip it
What it does. Software that clicks and types in your signed-in browser to post or reply for you.
Cost and licence. software free. Licence: not stated.
Platform rules. Not allowed or too risky. Browser-driven posting is out on Reddit; any automation of a normal user account is forbidden on Discord.
Verdict. Software that drives a signed-in browser breaks the terms of X, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which ban scripted logged-in sessions. Do not use it on those platforms.
- Source page, read 2026-10-08
What the full edition adds
- All 86 entries in the same detail as the ten above, not only the names and verdicts.
- The same data as CSV and JSON, so you can filter it.
- A grade on every source: P (the tool's or platform's own page, or a regulator), S (press or a review site), A (our assumption).
- The date each entry was read, so you can see what has gone stale.
Get the Tools Atlas, USD 9
PDF, EPUB, CSV and JSON in one zip, delivered by Gumroad right after payment. One payment, USD 9. No income promise. Refunds: If this product is not useful to you, ask within 14 days of buying, from your Gumroad receipt or at hello@ticassociation.com, and you get all your money back.
Questions
What is the TIC Tools Atlas?
A checked, dated reference of 86 tools, methods and platform connections for earning online, each with a verdict, cost, licence and the platform rules that apply.
Is any of it free?
Yes. The name and verdict of every entry, and ten full entries, are on this page. The paid edition has all 86 in full, as PDF, EPUB, CSV and JSON.
Does the Atlas promise income?
No. It is a reference list. What you earn depends on you, your audience and each platform's rules.
How current is it?
Each entry shows the date it was read; the latest is 2026-10-08. Tools and platform rules change, so check the date before you rely on one.