the short story
I’m Ottobong. By day I build AI products, real ones, with real users, real latency, real bills. That work put me somewhere most “AI reviewers” never stand: inside the APIs, watching exactly where a free tier ends and a paywall begins.
why the channel exists
Every week a million people search “free AI tools.” What they find is affiliate spam and tool-of-the-day hype written by people who never opened the app. There was no curator. No editor. No one with taste standing between the audience and the chaos.
So I started showing my work. Not “ten tools you should try”, the actual stack I use to ship, what’s free, what I pay for, and exactly where each one breaks. The value isn’t breadth. It’s judgement.
the engineer-to-creator turn
Building in public turned out to be the honest version of content. When you’re shipping a product while you film, you can’t fake the demo, the tool either survives Tuesday with your messy inputs or it doesn’t. That constraint is the whole brand.
Zela
I’m the founder of Zela , a creator operating system. The operating system for the creator business, brand deals, cross-platform analytics, global payments, audience growth, and a creator store, in one place. Living that problem at the platform level is what keeps the content grounded.