Claude

Claude is the assistant solo founders reach for when the work is long, written and consequential: a proposal that has to read well, a 90-page supplier agreement you need summarised accurately, a spreadsheet model you want talked through, or a sensitive customer email where tone matters. Its Projects feature works like a standing brief — load your brand notes, price lists, past proposals and house style once, and every conversation in that project starts already knowing them. The agent side is practical rather than flashy. On paid plans you can hand off and schedule tasks, so recurring jobs like a weekly report or a regular inbox digest run on a timetable. Connectors link Claude to the apps you already use, so it can search your drive, check your calendar context or pull from your tools instead of working only from what you paste in. Claude in Chrome and in Microsoft 365 puts the same help inside the browser tab or document you are already working in, which suits a founder who lives in email and spreadsheets. Claude Code, bundled into every paid plan, covers light technical work — fixing a website snippet, writing a small automation — without a separate subscription. Artifacts and file creation mean outputs arrive as usable documents, slides and sheets, not just chat text. The trade-offs are real: usage is metered in rolling five-hour and weekly windows shared across chat and code, so an intense day can end with a wait for reset, and there is no fixed message count to plan around.

Free tier; Pro is $20/month monthly or $17/month billed annually and is the realistic solo plan; Max ($100) and Ultra ($200) buy 5x–10x the usage for all-day users.