IT engineer, developer and researcher
Profile
IT engineer, developer and researcher
Palak is an IT engineer, developer and researcher, and runs ToolNest. He uses the software he writes about in his own development work and says so when he has not. Each article is checked against vendor documentation, changelogs and pricing pages; drafts may start with AI assistance, but he checks and edits every claim before it goes live.
The upgrade codemod handles the renames. What it cannot handle is a set of caching defaults that are all reasonable on Vercel and all capable of serving a broken page anywhere else. These are the four I check by hand, and the one my own config overrides.
Palak Patel4 min read
Both list at $20 a month. That number tells you almost nothing, because the cost that matters is what happens after the included usage runs out — and the two products handle that very differently. A comparison of the published terms, including what neither vendor will tell you.
Palak Patel3 min read
Hostinger's Node.js hosting has no GitHub integration, but it has an API. This is the workflow that deploys this site on every push, what the second version checks that the first did not, and how long a deploy takes.
Palak Patel4 min read
Three of the current Flash models carry a promotional rate that expires at the end of the year, and the pricing page says so in the same row as the price. If you are costing a project on today's number, you are costing it on a number with a deadline.
Palak Patel4 min read
Your Windows 10 PC still works, but it stopped getting free security fixes in October 2025. Here is what Microsoft's extended updates cost for households and businesses, what Windows 11 requires, and what it takes to put ChromeOS Flex or Linux Mint on the machine you already own.
Palak Patel8 min read
ChatGPT agent, Claude in Chrome, Perplexity's Comet and Google's auto browse will click, type and buy on your behalf. Before you hand one your logged-in browser, here is what each can access, what each vendor says it will ask before doing, and the attack every one of them is still vulnerable to.
Palak Patel7 min read
After a year of subscription price rises, a one-off licence is worth more than it used to be. Here are the office, design, writing, audio and video applications you can still pay for once, what 'perpetual' means for each of them, and where the free-forever option has quietly replaced the paid one.
Palak Patel7 min read
SpaceX closed its $60 billion purchase of Cursor in August, and a lot of developers are quietly working out their exit. This is the migration checklist: which rules files each tool reads, where the MCP configuration lives, what happens to keybindings and extensions, and which questions about your code's privacy to answer before you cancel.
Palak Patel6 min read
Excel's COPILOT function is withdrawn from today, Google Sheets has an AI function that reads the web, and Claude now sits in a side pane and edits your formulas. Here is what each one is for according to its own documentation, where each vendor tells you not to use it, and the one rule that keeps AI out of the cells that matter.
Palak Patel5 min read
OpenAI switched off its Atlas browser in August, less than a year after launching it, and the idea moved into extensions and modes inside the browser you already use. Here is how the four that remain describe themselves on the tasks people actually want done, and on the question the vendors' own safety pages keep raising: what happens when a web page gives your agent instructions.
Palak Patel6 min read
Notion Mail switches off on 22 September 2026, and four things in it do not live in Gmail. I list what to export by the 21st, then compare Superhuman, Spark, Shortwave, Thunderbird and the clients you already have on price, provider support and the AI features that were the reason you tried Notion Mail in the first place.
Palak Patel6 min read
Most diagrams are drawn once, pasted into a document and never edited again, which changes what a diagram tool needs to be. I compared the six I actually open — two free canvases, one free diagram editor and three paid whiteboards — on what the free tiers allow, what a seat costs, and which one to use for a sketch versus a system.
Palak Patel5 min read
A launcher is the keystroke between thinking of something and doing it. I compared Raycast, Alfred and Microsoft's PowerToys Command Palette on what the free versions do, what the paid tiers actually add, and whether the built-in Spotlight and Start menu have caught up enough to skip the category.
Palak Patel5 min read
A blocker you can switch off in two clicks is a suggestion, not a blocker. I compared Freedom, Cold Turkey, Opal and the limits built into your phone and laptop on the only thing that matters — how hard they are to get around at 3pm — and on what the paid tiers really buy.
Palak Patel5 min read
The three serious options for installing JavaScript dependencies now differ less on speed than on what they refuse to do. I compared npm, pnpm and Bun on disk use, lockfiles, monorepos and the supply-chain defaults that matter after a year of poisoned packages, and on the one change to Node itself that affects all three.
Palak Patel6 min read
The three buckets most small apps end up choosing between look identical from your code and cost wildly different amounts once users start downloading. I priced a realistic month on each — storage, requests and the egress line that decides it — and explain when S3's ecosystem is still worth paying for.
Palak Patel5 min read
SparkToro's 2026 study puts zero-click Google searches at 68%, up from 60% two years earlier, with AI Overviews doing most of the pushing. For a small site that lives on search traffic this is the number that matters. Here is what it does and does not mean, and what I changed.
Palak Patel5 min read
Lovable, Bolt and v0 will turn a paragraph into a working web app in an afternoon. Whether that app survives its first real user is a different question. Here is what each tool is for, what the credit-based pricing really costs, and the point at which you need a person.
Palak Patel6 min read
Microsoft 365 Business plans went up in July, Google Workspace went up the year before, and Office 2021 leaves support in October. For a small team that is three bills arriving at once. Here is what actually changed, what the alternatives cost, and the one exercise that settles the decision.
Palak Patel6 min read
A pricing figure, a statistic, a quote, a screenshot. Each one can be checked in under five minutes with tools that cost nothing, if you know which tool answers which question. This is the sequence I run on every article, and where it still fails.
Palak Patel6 min read
Kagi, Brave, DuckDuckGo and Perplexity are sold as alternatives to Google, but only some of them are alternatives to Google's index. Here is where each one's results come from, what they cost, and how to tell in a week whether switching is worth the friction.
Palak Patel6 min read
Google Trends, Search Console, Keyword Planner and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools cover most of what a small publication needs before it pays for anything. Here is what each one measures, what the numbers mean, and where the free tier stops.
Palak Patel6 min read
Arc stopped getting new features in 2025 and its maker now belongs to Atlassian. If you built your working day around Spaces and a sidebar, here is what each replacement actually gives you, what it costs, and why the right answer for most people is duller than they hoped.
Palak Patel6 min read
Pocket closed in July 2025 and took a lot of people's reading habit with it. I compared the survivors — Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Raindrop, Wallabag and your browser's own reading list — on what the free tiers cover, what you actually pay for, and how to stop the queue becoming a graveyard.
Palak Patel5 min read
Most teams under ten engineers do not need a feature flag service. Here is the point at which they do, what LaunchDarkly, PostHog, Flagsmith and Unleash actually cost when you get there, and the one habit that keeps flags from becoming a wall of switches nobody understands.
Palak Patel5 min read
A booking link saves you three emails and quietly tells the other person whose time is worth more. Here is the rule I use for which conversations get a link, and what the free tiers of Cal.com, Calendly and Google Calendar actually cover.
Palak Patel5 min read
Most of what people install PDF software for is already sitting on the machine: the browser reads and fills them, and one free command-line tool merges, splits and repairs them. Here is where that stops working and paying starts to make sense.
Palak Patel4 min read
Every comparison of Inngest, Trigger.dev, BullMQ and pg-boss argues about features. The decision is usually made earlier and by something else: whether your runtime lets you keep a worker process alive at all.
Palak Patel6 min read
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini have converged on roughly twenty dollars a month, which makes price the least useful thing to compare them on. The question that actually decides it is what you already have, and what you would stop doing if the subscription lapsed.
Palak Patel4 min read
Every team has one sheet that quietly turned into software. It has colour rules nobody remembers writing, a tab called Do Not Touch, and one person who understands it. Here is how to tell when it has outgrown itself, and what to move it to.
Palak Patel5 min read
Two of the smallest tools you can install, and two of the few that pay back on the first day. One stops you typing the same paragraph again; the other stops you losing the thing you copied thirty seconds ago.
Palak Patel4 min read
Login looks like a week of work and a form with two fields. The week is real; the form is not the part that costs you. Here is what the hosted providers charge, what the libraries give away, and which decision you are actually making.
Palak Patel5 min read
Async video gets recommended for everything and is right for about three things. Here is the test I use before hitting record, what the tools genuinely differ on, and why the free tier's five-minute limit is a better constraint than it looks.
Palak Patel6 min read
Password resets that never arrive are not a mystery. They are three DNS records and one architectural decision. Here is what SPF, DKIM and DMARC each prove, what Gmail and Yahoo now require in writing, and what sending actually costs once you price it.
Palak Patel6 min read
Most teams open their analytics twice a month and leave with the same three numbers. That is a small enough job that the tool doing it should be simple, cheap and honest about retention — and the honest part is where GA4 falls down for small sites.
Palak Patel6 min read
Local models are sold on privacy and cost, and argued about at the wrong altitude. The decision is really an arithmetic problem you can do before downloading anything, and it turns on how much memory you have and which job you are trying to move off the API.
Palak Patel7 min read
A slow pipeline does not just waste minutes, it changes how a team works: people stop waiting, start batching, and review code that has not finished checking. Here is where the time actually goes, and the four changes that recover most of it.
Palak Patel7 min read
Everyone knows the rule and almost nobody has implemented it, mostly because it sounds expensive and nobody has done the sum. For a team of five it is usually under ten pounds a month — and the copy you are missing is probably not the one on your laptop.
Palak Patel8 min read
Fathom, Otter and Granola are sold as the same product and are not. The real decision is whether a bot joins your call, who is allowed to record it, and what happens to the transcript afterwards. Here is how the options differ and how to test one in a fortnight.
Palak Patel7 min read
1Password put its individual plan up, Bitwarden roughly doubled Premium, and Proton Pass cut its price in half. The ranking people memorised two years ago no longer matches the invoices. Here is what actually moved, and how to decide without migrating twice.
Palak Patel6 min read
Sentry is priced by event volume, and event volume is not something you control on a bad day. Here is how the alternatives differ, what self-hosting really costs, and the four things to set up before you need any of them.
Palak Patel6 min read
The two assistants differ less in raw capability than in how they behave when a task exceeds what they can see. Here is what the vendors document, what independent benchmarks measure, and how to run the comparison on your own codebase in an afternoon.
Palak Patel6 min read
Aesthetic comparisons of AI image generators age badly and rarely predict your work. Five prompts, run yourself, eliminate most of the market in under an hour — and licensing decides the rest.
Palak Patel5 min read
A repeatable workflow for cutting webinars, podcasts and talks into clips people actually watch — and the steps where automation makes it worse.
Palak Patel5 min read
No password managers, no ad blockers, nothing you have already installed. Ten categories of extension that remove a repeated action, the four categories that quietly create work, and a rule for telling them apart before you install.
Palak Patel4 min read
A practical method for finding what to automate, choosing where to build it, and knowing when automation costs more than the task did.
Palak Patel4 min read
Most note apps optimise for capture. Very few help you find the thought again six months later. Here is what separates them.
Palak Patel4 min read
The free tiers are better than most people assume. Here is exactly what you gain by paying, and the cases where you gain nothing at all.
Palak Patel4 min read
Most of this market is one feature repackaged with a different subscription page. Three capabilities genuinely change what a small team can produce — and the pricing model matters more than any of them.
Palak Patel4 min read
Transcription, cloning and dubbing wear one label but sit at completely different levels of maturity. Treating them as one category is how teams end up disappointed — and, with cloning, exposed.
Palak Patel5 min read
Agent demos use fresh repositories and well-behaved tasks. Real backlogs contain vague tickets, undocumented decisions and untested code paths — and the difference between where agents succeed and where they fail is sharper than the marketing suggests.
Palak Patel5 min read
Every research assistant promises to read the literature for you. The question worth asking is what happens to a citation on the way into a summary — and whether the paper still says what the summary claims it says.
Palak Patel5 min read
Most subscription waste is not extravagance — it is tools that quietly stopped being used while the invoice kept arriving. Here is a repeatable audit, the single question that sorts the list fastest, and how to handle the tool somebody loves.
Palak Patel6 min read
Every task manager works in a calm week, which is why feature comparisons predict nothing. Three properties decide whether you are still using one in six months — and none of them appear on a pricing page.
Palak Patel4 min read
Not because Figma is bad — it is not — but because pricing, offline work and file ownership are real constraints, and three alternatives now clear the bar.
Palak Patel5 min read
Most terminal customisation makes your prompt prettier and your shell slower. These are the changes that measurably saved time over three months.
Palak Patel4 min read
The category nobody enjoys evaluating. Here is what actually matters when you are three people, and what only matters when you are thirty.
Palak Patel4 min read
The version in the productivity books assigns every hour and collapses the first time something unexpected happens. A much looser version — two or three blocks a day and slack for everything else — is the one people are still running months later.
Palak Patel3 min read
Publishing weekly is a queueing problem, not a writing problem. Five stages, two checkpoints, one buffer — and the reason a three-week pipeline ships more than a one-week sprint.
Palak Patel4 min read
Going async is usually described as fewer meetings. In practice it is a writing problem, a decision-making problem, and only incidentally a calendar problem.
Palak Patel4 min read
Free tiers disappear, rate limits change and terms get rewritten. Here is how to judge whether an API is safe to build on, and a few that pass.
Palak Patel5 min read
Six pieces of Postgres tooling that earn their place, what each one is actually for, the order to reach for them when something is slow, and the three common problems where none of them will help you.
Palak Patel4 min read
Managed platform, container on a VPS, Kubernetes, or static export. What each one costs you in setup and in ongoing ownership, the failure each one hides, and the constraint that should actually decide it.
Palak Patel3 min read
React changed its rules, and assistants trained largely on older code get the server/client boundary wrong with total confidence. My shortlist of the tools that handle it, and the four tasks that tell you within twenty minutes whether yours does.
Palak Patel5 min read
