I founded Easy With AI in early December 2022. I’ve been a web developer since 2010, mostly on side projects – but that background turned out to be exactly what I needed to get a directory like this off the ground.

My own interest in AI started with image generation – Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, and the open-source models and early interface extensions that came with them. When I first set out to build this site, I genuinely planned to focus on image tools alone, since at the time that’s where almost all the activity was. There were no video generators, music generators, or much else yet!

That changed fast. By late 2022, I was watching entirely new categories of tools appear seemingly every week – sound effect generators, presentation makers, conversational AI like ChatGPT. It became obvious that limiting the directory to image tools made little sense, so I decided to rebuild it around covering every type of AI tool as it emerged.

The directory launched with maybe 10 or so categories. It’s grown, piece by piece, to 50+ as new kinds of tools have emerged – you can browse the full list of categories here.

Guides and tutorials have always been just as important to me as the directory itself. I use a lot of these tools personally, so writing free, practical walkthroughs – how to actually use a tool, tips that aren’t obvious at first – felt like a natural extension of the site.

In mid-2023, I added a small, curated selection of AI courses – a mix of certified options (Coursera and similar) and free ones (Google, Hugging Face, and others), covering both general AI education and tool-specific training. I’ve deliberately kept this section relatively small, usually 20-30 courses, and prune it as courses go stale rather than letting it stagnate and become obsolete.

If there’s one thing running this site for years has taught me, it’s how fast this space changes. Tools and guides alike go out of date quickly, and tools get discontinued more often than you’d think. I do my best to flag or remove listings once a tool is no longer around – but it’s a genuinely hard thing to keep on top of across thousands of listings, and I won’t pretend like I catch every one immediately! But it’s also exactly one of the reasons why I think a well-maintained AI directory is still useful.

My goal with Easy With AI has stayed simple since day one: a straightforward, easy-to-browse hub where you can either search for something specific or just discover new tools at random. Which is also why tool ordering on the homepage and category pages is randomized rather than fixed, so there’s always something new to stumble across, not just whatever happened to be listed most recently. A lot of AI directories now try to be everything at once – news feeds, leaderboards, social features, AI-generated content tools of their own. I’ve intentionally kept Easy With AI focused on what it set out to do: help you find and learn AI tools, without the clutter.

If you’re curious about more of the backstory behind the site, I’ve written a bit about building Easy With AI on my LinkedIn – I don’t post there often, but it’s where I share some of the longer-form thoughts and insights.