If you have spent more than 10 minutes online in 2025, you have seen the script. Some guy sitting cross legged on a bed, holding a laptop, telling you that this one secret AI app will make you $12,000 a month, replace your entire job, and probably walk your dog. Over the last 90 days I have tested 72 separate consumer and small business AI apps, for work, for research, and out of sheer morbid curiosity. I gave up on keeping a spreadsheet after ap$p 41, they all started to blur together.
This is the AI apps review I wish I could have read three months ago. Almost everything you have read is a lie. 90% of the reviews ranking on Google right now are written by people who earn a (25 affiliate commission the second you click sign up.
The Big Three: What No One Will Tell You
Let’s start with the household names, the ones everyone already argues about, because most takes on them are completely unhinged. ChatGPT 4o is still the baseline. It is boring. It does not have any flashy new gimmicks. It has absolutely gotten lazier in the last four months, and will now regularly tell you to just google something instead of answering. But it is also the only general purpose AI that will almost never just completely make up a fact out of thin air. If I have to ask a question where being wrong matters, I still use GPT4o every single time. Claude 3 Opus is the best option no one uses. It can digest 200,000 words in one go, it is far more honest about when it doesn’t know something, and it is vastly better at editing and rewriting long form text.
It is terrible at casual brainstorming, terrible at code, and has the personality of a particularly polite librarian, but if you work with long documents there is no competition. Gemini Advanced is the most frustrating product I have ever used. It can pull text out of a blurry 10 second video clip. It can read a hand drawn diagram on a napkin and explain it perfectly. It will also, completely unprompted, tell you that Jimmy Carter died in 2021. If you work with images or video it is worth every penny. For literally anything else, it is dangerous.
The Overhyped Duds You Should Skip
Now for the ones you see everywhere, that you should absolutely not pay for. Suno is the most viral AI app of the last three months, and it is incredibly impressive at making 30 second pop songs. What no one tells you is that if you want to use any song you make for literally anything, you have to upgrade to the )1000 a year enterprise plan. The $10 a month plan gives you no commercial rights at all. It is a toy. An incredibly fun toy, but a toy. Devin, the so called AI software engineer, is the single most overhyped product of 2025.
Every tech influencer on Twitter told you it would make 80% of d$evelopers redundant. None of those people have ever written a line of production code. Devin can write a working to do app. It will also regularly delete half your code, introduce bugs that make no sense, and confidently tell you it fixed something that it did not touch. If you are a senior developer it will save you 10 minutes a day. If you are not a developer it will give you 1200 lines of broken garbage and you will have no idea how to fix it.
The Actually Good Apps No One Talks About
Now for the good part. The best AI apps right now are the ones no one is reviewing, because almost none of them have affiliate programs. Notebook from Google is the single most useful AI tool I have used in two years. You can upload 100 research papers, a 12 hour podcast transcript, an entire textbook, and have a conversation with the sum total of that information. It almost never hallucinates. It cites every single claim it makes back to the exact page of the exact document you uploaded. I used it to prep for a three hour professional exam last month and it cut my study time by 70%. No one talks about it. There is no commission.
Pieces is a tiny, unassuming AI clipboard manager that runs in the background of your computer. It remembers every single thing you have copied in the last year. That sounds useless until you copy 17 different slack messages, 3 emails, and a Github thread, then ask it “summarize what everyone actually agrees on about this bug”. It has saved me more time at work than every other AI tool combined.
Final Thoughts
There are three rules I now follow for every new AI app, that I have never seen mentioned in any other review.
- If it costs less than $10 a month, they are training their model on your data. Assume anything you upload will end up in the next version of their product.
- 60% of these apps make it functionally impossible to cancel your subscription. I currently have three ongoing chargeback$s.
- There is no AI app that will make you rich overnight. All of them are tools. A very good saw will not turn you into a master carpenter.
We are in a very strange moment for AI right now. The most hyped products are marketing campaigns first, and products a very distant second. The best tools are flying completely under the radar. If you try one new AI app this month, make it NotebookLM. Skip everything else you see on TikTok.
FAQs
Q: What is the best overall AI app in 2025?
A: For general purpose use, ChatGPT 4o. For long documents and research, Claude 3 Opus. For almost every other use case, Notebook.
Q: Are there any good completely free AI apps?
A: GPT-4o Mini is better than almost every paid AI app released in the last 6 months. 90% of the “new” free AI apps you see are just unbranded wrappers for it.
Q: Should I pay for Gemini Advanced?
A: Only if you work with video, images, diagrams or physical handwriting on a regular basis. For everything else it is not worth the money.
Q: Is it safe to upload confidential documents to AI apps?
A: Only ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude 3, and Notebook explicitly promise not to use your data for training. Every other consumer AI app reserves that right.
Q: What is the most overhyped AI app right now?
A: As of mid 2025, Devin. It is an incredibly impressive technical demo, but it is not remotely ready for real world professional use.