7 Developer Tools I Actually Pay For (And 3 That Are Free)

A developer's curated list of paid and free tools for a cost-effective development setup, totaling approximately $16 per month. Paid tools include DeepSeek v4 Pro for AI coding ($10/month), Railway for hosting ($5 credit), and Namecheap for domains ($1/month). Free tools include Gumroad for selling starter kits, Obsidian for knowledge management, and Neovim as a code editor.

I'm cheap. I use Arch Linux, Neovim, and open-source everything. But some tools are worth paying for. Here's my list. My AI coding agent runs on DeepSeek v4 Pro. Cheaper than GitHub Copilot $10 vs $19/month . Better for Vietnamese context. I use it through Hermes Agent to build boilerplates, write tests, and debug. DeepSeek Platform — $0.14/M input tokens Full-stack hosting that just works. Docker Compose one-click deploy. Built-in MongoDB + Redis. No YAML hell. No Kubernetes. Railway — free $5 credit I sell my NestJS/Next.js starter kits here. Free to list. They take 10% only on sales. Built-in email marketing to past customers. PayPal + card payments handled automatically. Gumroad — free to start Domains. .dev, .app, .com — pick whatever. I use .gumroad.com for now but will switch when there's more revenue. Namecheap — domains from $1/year AI agent that runs in my terminal. Builds projects, manages Obsidian, schedules cron jobs. It wrote 80% of my starter kits while I was AFK. Works with DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, local models. My second brain. PARA method. Everything I know about NestJS/Next.js/Go lives here. Free. Offline. No vendor lock-in. 0.12 "Stale Earth" with native LSP. No VS Code. No JetBrains. Instant startup. Full control. DeepSeek API: ~$10 Railway: ~$5 Domain: ~$1/month annual Gumroad: free until sale ───────────────────── Total: ~$16/month $16/month to run a full dev setup with AI coding, hosting, and a storefront. Not bad. Building a NestJS project? Save 7 hours of setup with my pre-configured starter kit.