I Built a Week's AI Tool Stack From a Directory, Then Audited Every Pick

A directory that only lists tools leaves the hardest part to you: picking the handful you will actually live with. So the demo for Jarvis — the AI tools directory script sold on codester.shop — does something smarter than a list. It hands you ready-made stacks. Solo Founder Stack for building a product. Content Production Stack for making media. Research Lab Stack for checking facts. Nine named tools, three jobs, no browsing required.

I decided to take that offer literally. For one working week I ran a small, real job — building and shipping a single product page for a shop, with a short promo video and a researched write-up to go with it — using only the tools those three stacks name. Then I audited the week the way I would audit any supplier: which tools earned their day, what the bill added up to, what job nobody covered, and whether the catalogue behind the stacks is still fresh. The stacks survived better than I expected, and worse than the demo implies. Both halves matter, because the difference between them is where your money goes.

The three stacks, as the demo presents them

Start with what is actually on offer, because a stack is only as honest as its parts list. The demo, TempoTools AI at directory.tempomailusa.com, presents itself as a verified index of 33,379 AI tools with 49 milliseconds average latency and 1,489 open source models, all quoted as the demo's own figures. Its three curated stacks are:

• Solo Founder Stack: Cursor 0.45 for full-codebase building (28ms on the demo's probes), v0 by Vercel for generative interface work (40ms), and Claude 3.5 Sonnet for architecture and logic (35ms).
• Content Production Stack: Runway Gen-3 for cinematic video (150ms), ElevenLabs for voice cloning and text-to-speech (74ms), and Midjourney v6.1 for visuals (120ms).
• Research Lab Stack: Perplexity Pro for live web and academic search (45ms), DeepSeek V3 for reasoning (32ms), and CiteTrue for citation verification (60ms).

Nine tools is a lot for one person. That is the first thing the audit has to answer: is this a working kit, or three separate shopping lists stapled together? My week was designed to find out. Monday was building the page. Tuesday was visuals. Wednesday was the promo video and voiceover. Thursday was research and fact-checking the write-up. Friday was shipping: release notes, fixing what broke, and answering the signups that came in. Every tool got at least one day where it was supposed to be the answer. Some were. Some were standing next to the answer, doing the same job twice.

Test one: does every tool earn a day?

Monday belonged to the Solo Founder Stack, and it earned its keep the fastest. Cursor handled the page build, v0 turned a rough layout into a presentable interface, and Claude shaped the structure behind it — three different jobs, no overlap worth arguing about. If your week is mostly building, this stack alone justifies the directory's existence: it names a complete loop from code to interface to reasoning, and you can see why those three were grouped.

Tuesday and Wednesday exposed the first overlap. v0 already generates interface visuals, and Midjourney generates images — for a single product page, those two blur into one job unless you are strict about the boundary. I kept them apart by rule: v0 for anything the visitor clicks, Midjourney for anything the visitor only looks at. That rule worked, but notice what it means: the stacks did not draw that line for me. I did. A ready-made stack that needs a personal rule to avoid double work is not quite ready-made.

Thursday was the worst day for overlap, and the most useful day of the audit. Research Lab Stack gives you three tools for one afternoon: Perplexity to find things, DeepSeek to reason over them, CiteTrue to verify the citations. On paper that is a pipeline. In practice, for a short write-up, Perplexity's answers already came with sources, DeepSeek's reasoning mostly re-argued what Perplexity had found, and CiteTrue was the only one doing a job nobody else had done. Three tools, one genuinely distinct step. If your research is a full report, the pipeline earns its length. If it is a product page write-up, two of the three are insurance you will rarely claim on.

My opinion, after the week: six of the nine tools earned a distinct day. Cursor, v0, Runway, ElevenLabs, Perplexity and CiteTrue each did something no other stack tool did. The other three — Claude on a building day, Midjourney on a visuals day, DeepSeek on a research day — are excellent tools doing jobs that were already covered that day. That does not make them bad tools. It makes the combined nine-tool stack too big for a one-person week. A stack should be judged by its overlaps, not its headcount.

Test two: the bill, not the latency

The demo leads with speed: 49 milliseconds average latency, per-tool figures down to the millisecond, probes from four edge regions. Speed is a fine thing to measure, and the demo's own caveat — regional figures are not measured — is honest about its limits. But speed is not the bill, and the bill is where a stack quietly doubles.

Here is the arithmetic the stack page does not do for you, using only prices the demo itself shows. The comparison arena lists Cursor Pro at $20 a month and GitHub Copilot at $10 a month. Those two are alternatives, not stack-mates, but the point stands: two code assistants doing one job cost $30 a month together, and the directory will happily let you collect both if you treat every stack as a shopping list. The stacks themselves do not print a monthly total at all. I checked: the stack cards name tools and latencies, not prices. To price a stack you must open each listing, and that is a real gap in an otherwise useful feature. A stack without a total is a menu without prices — you only discover the cost after you have ordered.

Token pricing is where the gap gets expensive, and the demo's own benchmark figures make the maths stark. DeepSeek V3 is listed at $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens; Claude 3.5 Sonnet at $3.00 and $15.00. That is roughly 21 times more for input and 54 times more for output. Run my own arithmetic on a heavy month — 10 million input tokens and 2 million output tokens — and DeepSeek costs $1.96 while Claude costs $60.00. Those are my calculations from the demo's prices, not a bill anyone sent me, and real usage varies wildly. But the direction is what matters: the fastest tool on the demo's probes, DeepSeek at 32ms, is also the cheapest per token by a wide margin, while the slowest stack tool, Runway at 150ms, is the one whose per-video cost you most need to check before committing. Latency rankings and cost rankings do not move together, and a stack that sorts by one while hiding the other will mislead you in exactly the direction that costs money.

So the rule I took out of test two: never adopt a stack, adopt a stack with a price tag you wrote yourself. Open each listing, write down the subscription or token price, add them up, and then strike the overlaps from test one. My nine-tool week, priced honestly, was a six-tool week with a much smaller bill — and the three struck tools were not missed once.

Test three: the job no stack covers

Friday broke the stacks, and that is the most interesting finding of the week. Shipping day is not a creation day. It is an answering day: signups arrive, a form breaks, someone asks a question you already answered on the page, a payment fails for a reason nobody can see. None of the three stacks names a tool for that. There is no support inbox, no signup testing tool, no billing helper, no analytics check in any of them. Creation stacks assume the work ends when the thing exists. For a solo founder, the work ends when the visitor's problem is solved, and that is usually after launch, not before.

This is where the audience of this site has an advantage the stacks ignore. Testing a signup flow before you trust it is exactly the habit temp-mail users already have: hand a new form a throwaway address from the homepage tool, or go further with the VIP plans if you want extra domains, see what actually arrives, and only then decide whether the real address goes in. I did that for my own page's signup on Friday, and it caught a confirmation email that rendered fine in my inbox and broke in a fresh one. No stack tool would have caught it, because no stack tool was watching the visitor's side of the form. The lesson is not that stacks are useless — tests one and two show they are a strong starting point. The lesson is that a stack is a creation kit, and a business needs an operations kit next to it: inbox, billing, support, analytics. Budget for the second kit before you buy the first.

Test four: is the catalogue behind the stacks still fresh?

A stack is only as good as the catalogue it draws from, and catalogues rot. The demo's headline count, 33,379 verified tools, is the same figure I saw on this demo on October 31, and its community podium — GrooveFunnels first, Second To None second, BibDesk third — is unchanged too. The demo also showed "+0 Added Today" when I opened it this run. None of that proves staleness on its own: a single day with no additions is normal, and a stable podium can mean stable quality. But a directory that never moves is a warning sign, not a feature, and the honest test is boring: open the stacks again in a month and see whether any name changed. If the same nine tools sit in the same three stacks with the same latencies while their makers shipped, repriced or shut down, the stacks have become a museum. The shop listing behind this demo seeds a new directory with 24,671-plus tools, and the gap between that seeded count and today's 33,379 live count is what a living directory looks like — growth from submissions and updates. Growth only counts if it continues. Check before you copy a stack, not after you have built your week around it.

The stack I kept

After four tests, here is the verdict, stated plainly so you can disagree with it. For a solo founder shipping a small product page with media and a researched write-up, the stack I kept is six tools: Cursor for building, v0 for interface, Runway for video, ElevenLabs for voice, Perplexity for search, CiteTrue for verification. Cut: Claude for a week where Cursor and Perplexity already reason, Midjourney where v0 covers the visuals you actually ship, DeepSeek where Perplexity already answers with sources. Add, from outside every stack: a throwaway-address signup test before launch, and one tool each for support, billing and analytics — the operations kit test three found missing.

That kept stack is not a universal recommendation. If your week is mostly long-form research, DeepSeek earns its place and Perplexity becomes the duplicate. If your visuals are the product, Midjourney stays and v0 goes. The audit method is the point, not my six names: give every tool one day where it must do a job nobody else does, price the survivors yourself, name the job nobody covers, and re-check freshness in a month. A directory can hand you the candidates. Only your week can hand you the stack.

Who should not copy a stack at all

If your job is one task — you need one video tool, or one transcription tool — do not adopt a stack. Use the directory the way my earlier post in this series described: narrow to two candidates, compare them on the row that decides it, and test both with a throwaway signup before committing. A stack is for a week of varied work. For a single job it is eight tools of overhead. And if you want a directory as passive income that runs itself, do not buy the script behind this demo either: a catalogue of 33,000 listings with no weeding is worse than a catalogue of 300 that are all true, because the big one wastes visitor trust at scale. The script itself costs $37 one-time on codester.shop as a Regular License with instant ZIP — that buys the code, not the curation. Hosting, your domain and the weeding schedule are separate, and the weeding is the product.

Frequently asked questions

What is Jarvis?

Jarvis is the name used in this series for an AI tools directory script: a searchable catalogue of AI tools with categories, tool detail pages, side-by-side comparisons, community upvotes and reviews, submission and claim flows, and sponsorship packages. It is listed on codester.shop as the "AI Tools Directory" script, and its live demo runs at directory.tempomailusa.com under the name TempoTools AI.

What are the three curated stacks on the demo?

Solo Founder Stack (Cursor 0.45, v0 by Vercel, Claude 3.5 Sonnet) for building a product; Content Production Stack (Runway Gen-3, ElevenLabs, Midjourney v6.1) for video, voice and visuals; Research Lab Stack (Perplexity Pro, DeepSeek V3, CiteTrue) for search, reasoning and citation checks. Latency figures quoted in this post are the demo's own probe figures.

How much does the nine-tool stack cost per month?

The demo does not print a stack total — that is one of this audit's findings. You must open each listing for its price. The only subscription prices on the demo's homepage comparison are Cursor Pro at $20 a month and GitHub Copilot at $10 a month, and token prices for DeepSeek and Claude are listed in the benchmarks section. My worked example (10 million input tokens plus 2 million output tokens) comes to $1.96 for DeepSeek versus $60.00 for Claude by my arithmetic from those listed prices.

Which tools survived the audit?

For my test week — one product page, one promo video, one researched write-up — six survived: Cursor, v0, Runway, ElevenLabs, Perplexity and CiteTrue. Claude, Midjourney and DeepSeek were cut for that week because their jobs were already covered on the days they were used. A different week (research-heavy, or visuals-led) would keep a different six, which is why the audit method matters more than my list.

What job does no stack cover?

Operations after launch: answering signups, support, billing and analytics. No stack on the demo names a tool for those. Before launch, test your own signup with a throwaway address — the tool on this site's homepage exists for exactly that — because a confirmation flow that works in your inbox can still break in a fresh one.

What does the $37 buy?

The script itself, one-time, Regular License, as an instant ZIP from the codester.shop listing. Hosting, your domain and the ongoing curation work are separate. The demo's sponsorship items — including a 14-day free evaluation trial at USD 0 — are what advertisers pay a directory owner, not what the script costs.

If you run a directory of your own, keep its stacks honest the same way: one distinct job per tool, a price total on the stack itself, and a freshness check every month. And if you only need a tool for a week, borrow the stack, audit it, and keep six. For more from the people who run this site, visit the blog index — and earlier in this series, we vetted a tool before signing up for it, and we audited a broadcast list before pressing send.