★ Top 1% Upwork (8 years) 286+ client deployments 2,036+ projects shipped GoHighLevel Certified Partner ★ Featured speaker: GHL Summit 2025 ● Client Login
The tools we actually run · across 286 client deployments

Software
we love.

No "best of 2026" lists. Just the tools we run inside paid client engagements. Some links below are affiliate (marked AFF) — they offset the cost of running this site without changing your price. We only list what we'd recommend without compensation.

★ Honest disclosure: Several of these are affiliate links — meaning AutomateScale earns a referral fee if you sign up. Three rules: (1) we only recommend tools we use on client engagements, (2) the affiliate relationship doesn't change your price or terms, (3) when we mark a pick "affiliate-free," that link has no kickback.
Daily-driver stack · always on
GoHighLevel
Make.com
Zapier
n8n
Stripe
Twilio
ElevenLabs
Descript
Kajabi
ActiveCampaign
WordPress
Divi
HubSpot
Gusto
★ Jump to category
CRM & Funnels Email & Marketing Automation Webinars & Courses Memberships WordPress ★ AI Models & LLMs AI & Voice Payments Design Operations

CRM & Funnels 5 tools

GoHighLevel ★ PARTNER
The agency platform we standardize on across 286+ deployments. CRM, funnels, SMS, calendar, white-label SaaS — all under one roof. Sign up via ghl.automatescale.com to support our work at no extra cost.
Daily driverAFFStart 14-day trial →
Keap (Infusionsoft)
Sales & marketing CRM with deep automation roots. Solid for service businesses moving off email-only.
AFFOpen →
HubSpot
Enterprise CRM with strong marketing hub. We use it on larger B2B engagements with sales-led motions.
Affiliate-freeOpen →
SamCart
Checkout, cart, and order-bump optimization. The conversion uplift on bumps and one-click upsells pays for itself.
AFFOpen →
Leadpages
Fast-deploy opt-in pages and lead capture. Useful when speed-to-launch beats deep customization.
AFFOpen →

Email & Marketing 4 tools

ActiveCampaign
Email marketing + automation + lite CRM. Best deliverability and segmentation engine in its tier.
AFFOpen →
Campaign Monitor
Designer-friendly email marketing with the cleanest visual editor in the category.
Affiliate-freeOpen →
GetResponse
All-in-one marketing platform — email, webinars, funnels. Strong for course creators on a budget.
AFFOpen →
Thrive Suite
WordPress lead-gen suite: forms, quizzes, ovation. Killer for split-testing on owned land.
AFFOpen →

Automation & Workflow 4 tools

Make.com
Visual automation between platforms. Our default for any non-trivial scenario — branching, error paths, iterators.
Daily driverOpen →
Zapier
Workflow automation across 6,000+ web apps. We reach for it when a niche app has a Zapier connector and nothing else.
AFFOpen →
n8n
Self-hostable automation. The escape hatch when client data sovereignty, on-prem, or unlimited ops cost matters.
Affiliate-freeOpen →
PlusThis
Power add-ons for Keap, Drip, Ontraport — countdown timers, deadline funnels, behavioral triggers.
AFFOpen →

Webinars & Courses 3 tools

WebinarJam / EverWebinar
Live + evergreen webinars with chat, polls, and replay funnels. Reliable workhorse for course launches.
AFFOpen →
Kajabi
All-in-one creator platform — courses, communities, landing pages. Strong for solo experts who want one bill.
AFFOpen →
Deadline Funnel
Real per-subscriber deadlines, not fake countdowns. The honest way to run evergreen launches.
AFFOpen →

Memberships 2 tools

Memberium
Membership sites on Keap/Infusionsoft. The standard if you've already standardized on Keap.
AFFOpen →
MemberPress
WordPress membership plugin. Owned-land alternative to Kajabi when you want full design + data control.
AFFOpen →

WordPress & Hosting 4 tools

WordPress
The CMS we still default to for owned-land sites. 20+ years of plugin ecosystem; nothing else comes close.
Affiliate-freeOpen →
Divi · Elegant Themes
WordPress theme + visual builder. Lifetime license that pays for itself across multiple client builds.
AFFOpen →
Gravity Forms
Advanced WordPress forms with conditional logic, payments, and 30+ integrations. Outlasts the alternatives.
AFFOpen →
Bluehost
Entry-level managed WordPress hosting. We reach for it when a client needs cheap, fast, and "good enough".
AFFOpen →

AI Models & LLMs 9 models

The model layer behind every Scale System™ deployment. We don't pick one — we route per-task to whichever model wins on quality / cost / latency for that specific turn (per the cheap-planner pattern in Scale Brief #147).

Claude (Anthropic)
Our daily driver for agent reasoning, retrieval-grounded chat, and code. Opus + Sonnet rotation depending on task complexity.
Daily driverOpen →
OpenAI (GPT family)
GPT-5 + GPT-4o for vision-heavy tasks, embeddings, structured-output guarantees. The most-broadly-integrated model in our agent stack.
Daily driverOpen →
Gemini (Google)
Pro + Flash for long-context retrieval, video understanding, and multi-modal reasoning. Native integration with Google Workspace data.
Daily driverOpen →
Lovable
AI app + UI builder. Ships a working React+Supabase MVP from a prompt in minutes. 50+ Adam prototypes built on it — see /labs for the gallery (21 published).
Daily driverOpen →
Gemini Nano
On-device + ultra-cheap classification model. Powers the cheap-planner layer routing decisions before frontier models touch a turn.
In productionOpen →
Llama (Meta)
Open-weight models for self-hosted client deployments where data residency matters. Llama 3.1 405B + 70B for sovereign-stack engagements.
Open weightsOpen →
Mistral
European-hosted, fast, open-weight option. Used for GDPR-strict client deployments and edge-latency-sensitive workloads.
Open weightsOpen →
Perplexity
Search-augmented generation for research agents that need current-web grounding. Used inside capture-layer enrichment pipelines.
In productionOpen →
Cohere
Best-in-class embeddings + rerank for RAG retrieval layers. The Cohere Rerank API is what makes our agent KBs feel sharp on first-touch.
In productionOpen →

AI & Voice 4 tools

Descript
AI video + podcast editing. Edit by transcript, generate clean voice-overs, ship in a fraction of the time.
AFFOpen →
ElevenLabs
Best-in-class AI voice + conversational agents. Powers the voice layer on most of our agent deployments.
Daily driverOpen →
HeyGen
AI avatar video at scale. The fastest path we've found to personalized outbound video that doesn't look uncanny. Powers the Avatar Fleet.
AFFOpen →
Descript Studio
Multi-track collaborative AI video studio. Workflow upgrade from solo Descript when teams scale.
AFFOpen →
✨ HeyGen + ElevenLabs power the AutomateScale Avatar Fleet — packaged into client deployments with a custom multicam capture pipeline, founder-clone training, and weekly render cadence. 1,800+ minutes shipped.
See Avatar Fleet →

Payments & Communications 2 tools

Stripe
The payments rail under almost every funnel we build. Subscription logic, tax, fraud, connected accounts.
Daily driverOpen →
Twilio
SMS, voice, WhatsApp, and conversation APIs. The fabric beneath every multi-channel follow-up sequence we ship.
Affiliate-freeOpen →

Design & Productivity 4 tools

Adobe Creative Cloud
Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere. Still the industry baseline for any heavy creative work.
Affiliate-freeOpen →
Lucidchart
Flowcharts, process maps, UML. The whiteboard for every funnel architecture we hand off to a client.
Affiliate-freeOpen →
iThoughts
iPad-first mind-mapping. The thinking tool when ideas are pre-process and pre-deck.
Affiliate-freeOpen →
Bitly
Branded short links + click attribution. The middle layer between channels and analytics.
Affiliate-freeOpen →

Operations 1 tool

Gusto
Payroll, benefits, and HR for the team behind the agency. Boring done well = compounding hours back.
AFFOpen →
Want the system that ties these tools together?

The tools are easy.
The system is the moat.

Tools work. What 95% of operators miss: the architecture, knowledge bases, agents, and SOPs that turn a stack into a revenue operation.

Apply for Q3 2026 → See the OS
★★★★★

"thanks for creating a great funnel for me :)"

Automate + Scale · 1.5h·2021 · Upwork verified →
★★★★★

"thanks for creating a great funnel for me :)"

Automate + Scale · 1.5h·2021·Upwork verified → · Upwork ✓
★★★★★

"This review is in regards to a consultation only. I look forward to working with Adam in the near future."

60 minute consultation · 2023·Upwork verified → · Upwork ✓