AI MarTech stack (May 2026): the sub-$250 setup for B2B content

It's 2024: A meeting comes up where I need to show the work. So I open Notion, update the brain. Open MailerLite, check the campaign metrics. Open the Google Sheet, log the latest pipeline numbers. Check Google Analytics and Google Search Console to get a pulse of visibility. Open HubSpot, double-check that contact records still match. By the time the meeting starts, every system is current. It feels good for about a week.

Then the systems drift. Notion gets stale. The Sheet falls behind. The email tool has results I never logged anywhere. Another meeting comes up. The cycle restarts.

For years that was the rhythm. The pain wasn't any single tool. It was the recurring update tax I paid every time a stakeholder needed visibility.

Now 2026: What broke the pattern wasn't a better tool. It was AI workflows. The criteria for choosing software changed.

The question stopped being "does this tool do its job well" and started being "can Claude actually talk to this directly."

This is the May 2026 stack at the top of my list.

The pattern isn't just mine.

Roughly half of B2B marketers have adopted AI tools in their workflows: 51% on personalization engines, 49% on generative AI, 47% on predictive analytics (Sagefrog 2026 report).

At the same time, 62% of B2B teams plan to reduce their tool count over the next 12 months (Martech Alliance 2025).

The direction shows up in outcomes. Companies running five or fewer core tools see 23% higher marketing-attributed pipeline per headcount than those running ten or more (Forrester 2025 benchmark).

Adoption is up, tool count is going down, and the leaner setups are pulling ahead.

What is the new criteria for picking martech?

Most marketing stacks are evaluated on features. The new criteria is different. A tool earns its place if Claude can read it, write to it, and orchestrate around it without me opening a tab. Each context switch is a tax. A stack designed around one orchestration layer pays it once.

Small caveat: Notion is still where some knowledge lives. Google Sheets (and the Google stack, in general) is still used. I still enjoy hopping into Figma to design "manually," although this happens less and less.

This is reevaluation in progress, not a clean rebuild. The deeper frame on what this looks like as a system lives in the pillar guide.

The stack below is six tools, doing the work that twelve used to do, for sub-$250 a month.

PostHog: analytics one prompt away

PostHog replaced Google Analytics. Not officially, but it's consistently the preferred analytics platform for new tech companies, including Y Combinator portfolio teams and products like Supabase and Resend.

The reason isn't analytics quality. GA4 is fine for what it does.

It's that PostHog connects to Claude through MCP, the standard Anthropic uses for letting Claude talk to outside tools. I live-prompt for production data during a session. "Show me organic landing pages from the last 28 days." "What's the conversion rate on /contact, broken down by source?" The data is one prompt away, not one tab away.

Its heatmaps are also useful, where previously I'd use a separate tool like Hotjar.

I set up dashboards the same way. No drag-and-drop dashboard builder. I describe what I want, Claude builds the insight, the dashboard updates. When I want to revise the cut, I prompt the change instead of clicking through the UI.

The shift isn't from a worse tool to a better tool. It's from interrupting myself to look something up to never leaving the conversation in the first place.

Linear: the kanban that survives a Claude session

Sessions in Claude get messy. A two-hour session might generate twenty observations, ten followups, three things I should fix later. By the end the to-do state lives in scrollback, which is the same as not existing.

Linear holds the work that needs to outlive the session. It's where ongoing platform issues live for the Content Lab app, where SEO experiments are tracked for duo.ca, where I separate "today's focus" from "noise to revisit." Claude can open issues from inside the repo when it spots tech debt, which means the cleanup work doesn't get lost in the shuffle.

It's also helpful to manually plan my day or week by dragging Linear items into my todo list and having Claude plan and execute.

GitHub, Vercel, and Supabase: the storage and deployment layer

Group these three. They're separate tools, but in this stack they do one job. Save anywhere, access anywhere, durably.

GitHub holds the duo.ca codebase, every MDX article on this site. When I draft an article, it's a file in a repo, version-controlled, reviewable, durable. Not a Google Doc that lives in someone's account.

Vercel deploys all of it. Push to main, the site rebuilds. I can ship a new landing page, a content piece, an experimental redirect, in under a minute. The "rapid landing page experiment" most marketers talk about is real here, because the deploy step is invisible.

Supabase holds the operational data. The shift was treating all operational data as something that belongs in a durable store, not a Notion doc that drifts. If you're building a static site, or an app that only you interact with, this might not be necessary. Once you start introducing clients, Supabase is the database that stores the information.

The collective mental model is simple. Code is in GitHub. Sites are on Vercel. Data is in Supabase. Claude can read and write to all three. Nothing critical is trapped behind a vendor's UI.

Resend: email infrastructure

Resend handles transactional email. Newsletter delivery, contact form notifications, subscriber confirmations, anything that needs to go from a system to a person.

It replaced MailerLite and parts of HubSpot. The shift wasn't price (though Resend costs almost nothing at the volumes I send). It was that Resend exposes its full SDK and Claude can compose, schedule, and send through code.

The Studio Notes newsletter, drip emails, and form notifications all run through it. Templates live in the repo as React components, so editing an issue is the same workflow as editing a page on the site.

The trade is fewer marketing-team-friendly UI features. No drag-and-drop campaign builder, no built-in CRM. For a developer-led content system that's the right trade. For a marketing team that still wants the campaign builder, MailerLite or Mailchimp is the safer call.

What does this stack cost?

The full stack runs sub-$250 a month. Specific numbers, since most pricing pieces in this category get vague:

Migrating duo.ca off Webflow knocked $40 a month off the recurring bill on its own. The savings weren't the goal. They were a useful confirmation that the new stack wasn't more expensive than the old one.

Specific numbers are easier to argue with. They're also easier to trust.

What does this mean for B2B teams?

HubSpot still serves a real purpose for teams that need a CRM with sales integrations baked in. MailerLite is still the right call if your needs map cleanly to its product. The traditional marketing stack isn't dead.

The point is narrower. AI workflows change the criteria for choosing tools. If your stack can't talk to Claude, you're paying a context-switching tax every time you sit down to work. If it can, the orchestration layer becomes the stack.

For a B2B content engineer running a lean function, that's the difference that mattered. Reevaluating is enough. You don't need to throw it all out.

For more on what this stack runs in practice, the content engineer manifesto covers the workflows that sit on top of it. The pillar guide goes deeper on the underlying patterns. If you want to talk about applying this to your own stack, book a discovery call.