The monthly AI design curation: what got better, what got worse, what's worth paying for

Every roundup of AI tools has the same problem: it's written from launch announcements rather than from use. A tool ships an impressive demo, gets included everywhere for a month, and quietly turns out to be unusable on a real project.

This is the format we use instead. It's structured around four questions, asked of tools we've actually put through work.

The four questions

1. What got genuinely better? Not "what shipped a feature," but what changed such that a task you do regularly is now measurably faster or better.

2. What got worse? Price rises, quality regressions, features moved behind a higher tier, output that got blander after a model update. Nobody writes this section and it's the most useful one.

3. What's worth paying for? Of the things that improved, which justify a line item. A tool that saves you twenty minutes a month is a fun toy, not a subscription.

4. What can you now stop paying for? Consolidation is the biggest under-reported story in this space. Capabilities keep getting absorbed into tools you already have.

What got better

Generation that respects your system. The most meaningful shift of the last year isn't better-looking output. It's that tools like v0 and Figma Make now produce work against your tokens and your components instead of inventing their own. That's the difference between a nice screenshot and something a team can merge.

Vector output. Recraft producing genuine editable SVGs, with a reusable pinned style, changed asset production from "generate and trace" to "generate and ship."

Research capture. Granola-style enriched note-taking has made it realistic to run more sessions without drowning in transcript cleanup. The quality gain is indirect: you're present in the interview instead of typing.

Motion that ships. Rive continues to be the clearest example of a tool that removed a handoff entirely: the file the designer makes is the file that runs in production.

What got worse

The blandness problem, on image models. Successive updates have optimised for average preference, which means the default output of most image models is more competent and less interesting than it was two years ago. You now have to work harder to get something with a point of view.

Pricing opacity. Credit systems, per-seat plus per-generation hybrids, and "contact us" tiers have made it genuinely difficult to compare tools. Budget for more than the sticker price; nobody's first month matches their estimate.

Feature sprawl. Several tools that were excellent at one thing have become mediocre at six. The one-job tools on this site's directory tend to age better than the platforms.

Rights ambiguity on smaller tools. As the market crowded, terms got vaguer. If a tool won't state plainly whether you can ship its output commercially, that's an answer.

What's worth paying for

The test we apply: would you notice within a week if it disappeared?

Passes for most product designers: Figma, an LLM subscription (Claude or equivalent), and one asset tool matched to what you make most, whether that's Recraft for vectors or Midjourney for concept imagery.

Passes for teams: a research repository (Dovetail) and visual regression (Chromatic). Both are boring and both prevent expensive mistakes.

Usually doesn't pass: standalone AI wireframing tools, logo generators, anything whose core function has been absorbed into Figma, and second and third image models bought "for variety."

What you can stop paying for

Audit these quarterly, because the answer changes:

• Standalone mockup generators. Largely absorbed into Figma plugins and Recraft.
• Separate transcription services, if your meeting tool now transcribes acceptably.
• Second image models. Most people use one 90% of the time and pay for three.
• AI writing tools, if you have a general LLM subscription and a good context block. The specialist tools mostly wrap the same models with a nicer UI.

Running this yourself

If you want to keep an honest picture of your own stack, do this once a quarter, since it takes about an hour:

List every AI subscription and its monthly cost. Most teams are surprised by the total.

For each, name the specific task it does. If you can't name one in a sentence, that's the answer.

Check for absorption. Has a tool you already pay for gained this capability? This is where most savings hide.

Test one replacement. Pick your most expensive line item and spend an afternoon with the closest cheaper alternative. Sometimes it's worse. Sometimes it's been better for six months and nobody checked.

The point isn't frugality. It's that a stack you've actively chosen works better than one you've accumulated.

Browse the full directory at designresourc.es, or start with the AI tools for designers list.