Darren WellsGet in touch

Uses

Everything I run two companies and five brands with, as one person. Not a recommendation list - a receipt. It's a uses page, and I've marked which ones I'd pay for again.

How to read the labels

  • Core Daily, and I'd pay full price again
  • Lifetime Bought once on a deal, earning its keep
  • Legacy Kept for existing client work only
  • Retired Stopped paying, and why

The AI team

Four of the five seats on the team. This is the bit people email about.

Claude, in three places

Same model, three jobs. Planning and strategy happen in claude.ai with a project per brand and the brand documents loaded. Building happens in Antigravity with Claude inside it, and in Claude Code from the terminal. All three read and write to digitopia.app through its MCP server, so nothing lives only in a chat.

  • claude.aiStrategy, copy, systems design, this website. Memory on, one project per brand.
  • AntigravityPrimary build environment. Agentic IDE with Claude driving, me reviewing.
  • Claude CodeTerminal work, handover notes in, shipped code out. Runs the security sweep before anything merges.
  • Skills and MCPRoughly twenty skills I've written - Monday brief, quote builder, de-slop audit, brand gate - so the agents do things my way.

Build stack

Everything new is built on this. No exceptions since 2025.

Next.js

Core

App Router, TypeScript. Every Labs property, digitopia.app, and this site.

Supabase

Core

Postgres, auth, storage. Row-level security on every table, because I'll be the one who gets the email if it isn't.

Vercel

Core

Hosting and previews. A preview URL per branch is what makes reviewing agent-built code bearable.

Resend

Core

Transactional email. Magic links, receipts, the boring reliable stuff.

Stripe

Core

Payments for Labs products. Separate account under a Stripe Organisation so the two companies don't share a till.

GitHub

Core

Every repo. Claude Code opens the PRs; I read them.

Running the business

Where tasks, clients, money and email live. Most of this replaced something.

digitopia.app

Core

My own business OS - tasks, clients, content board, quotes, notes, capture inbox - with an MCP server so the AI team can read and write to it. Built on the stack above. It's the single source of truth; if it isn't in here, it isn't happening. Replaced ClickUp in 2026.

Cal.com

Core

The booking link on Labs. Fit calls only; everything else is email.

Canary Mail + Forward Email

Core

Business mail. Forward Email handles the domains, Canary handles the reading. Neither is exciting, both are quiet.

Google Workspace

Core

Calendar, Drive, Gmail for the legacy side. Connected to Claude so it can see the week.

Microsoft 365

Core

Because pensions clients send Word documents, and they always will.

Pabbly Connect

Lifetime

Automation glue for the bits that don't have an MCP server yet. Slowly being replaced by the app.

Shopify

Core

Bantered lives here. Print on demand, low stakes, connected to Claude for product and collection work.

ClickUp

Retired

Five years, then replaced by a tool I built in a few weeks with agents. Nothing wrong with it; it just wasn't mine.

Design

Twenty years of muscle memory, most of it still in Figma.

Figma

Core

Design systems, wireframes, client work. Connected to Claude so mockups can turn into code without a handover document.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Core

Photoshop and Illustrator for the things Figma is bad at. Resented monthly, used weekly.

Canva

Core

Social for the internal brands. Kirsty's tool more than mine.

Envato Elements

Core

Stock, icons, fonts, mockups. Cheaper than the alternative, which is me drawing icons.

Topaz Studio

Lifetime

Photo clean-up and upscaling. Earns its keep on client headshots that arrived at 400 pixels wide.

Sketch and Adobe XD

Retired

Both on the old version of this site. Figma won. XD lost by forfeit.

Marketing and SEO

One primary tool, a handful of lifetime deals, and the two free things Google gives you.

Ubersuggest

Core

Primary SEO tool. Keyword research, site audits, rank tracking, and it has an MCP server so the Researcher seat can use it directly.

MailerLite

Core

Marketing email and automation. The scorecard nurture sequences and The AI Layer both live here.

GA4 and Search Console

Core

Free, unglamorous, and the only two numbers that matter: did they come, did they book.

Google Ads

Core

A small, watched budget on Labs. Conversion is a booked call, not a click.

Wope, Nozzle, Ranktracker, Local Rank Tracker

Lifetime

Four rank trackers bought on deals over the years. One is enough. I check them quarterly to remind myself which one.

The AppSumo drawer

Lifetime

Forms, client portals, WordPress plugins, SEO odds and ends. Some are excellent. Some were £49 lessons. Before buying anything new I check the drawer first, and so does Claude.

WordPress, legacy

Kept for the finance clients Digitopia Design looks after. Good tools, well used, not where new things get built.

WordPress.com Business

Legacy

Hosting for client sites. Custom plugins and code enabled, backups handled, one less thing to patch.

Elementor Pro + Hello theme

Legacy

The page builder on every client site. Clients can edit their own pages, which was the whole point.

ACF Pro

Legacy

Custom fields, post types, taxonomies. The bit that turns a brochure site into something with structure.

Dynamic.ooo + WPCodeBox

Legacy

Dynamic content in Elementor, and somewhere sane to keep the code snippets.

Rank Math

Legacy

SEO plugin on the client sites that need it.

Google Optimize

Retired

Google retired it, not me. It was on the old site's logo strip. So it goes.

The rules

How something gets on this page, and how it gets off.

  • Check the drawer first. Before any new subscription, look at what I already own. Most gaps are already covered by something bought in 2021.
  • Default to the stack. If it can be built on Next.js, Supabase and Vercel, it is. New tools need a reason the stack can't give.
  • If it can't talk to Claude, it's on notice. An MCP server or a decent API is now part of "is this tool any good".
  • Retire loudly. When something goes, it gets a line here saying why. Quiet churn is how you end up paying for four rank trackers.
  • Nothing here is sponsored. No affiliate links, no deals. If that ever changes it'll say so on the tool.

Want your own version of the AI team?

That's what Digitopia Labs does - the workspace, the skills, the source of truth - set up for how you work rather than how I do.

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