AI Side Hustles Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-05-11 · 7 min read

Dan Martell tested 500 AI tools — what the ‘make you rich’ pitch leaves out

Verdict: Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work. The tools Martell ranks are mostly real and mostly useful, but the headline promise depends on a business and skills the video assumes you already have.

Dan Martell’s “I Tested 500+ AI Tools, These Will Make You Rich” sits at the intersection of a tech-review video and a sales pitch. Across roughly fifteen minutes, Martell — a Canadian SaaS coach who now runs a holding company called Martell Ventures — sorts about 20 AI products into S, A, B, C, and F tiers based on how much money he thinks each can make a business owner. The video has pulled in 76,937 views at the time of this review. The pitch is clean and the on-camera energy is high, but the structural problem shows up before you finish counting: at least six of the tools he ranks are companies he owns or has invested in, and four of those land in his top “S tier.”

What the video actually claims

Martell opens by saying he runs an AI venture studio that launches new companies every month and has personally tested 500+ AI tools. He then walks through a tier list. The S tier, his “buy now” recommendations, includes Apex (“one of my companies within Martell Ventures”), Claude, Gemini, Gum Loop, and Revio (“one of my companies”). The A tier and B tier mix mainstream tools (Notebook LM, Whisper Flow, Higsfield.ai, Nano Banana, Gamma) with three more portfolio companies — Frank (“one of our portfolio companies”), BuddyPro (“full disclosure, it’s one of the companies in my portfolio”), Social Sweep (“another product in my portfolio”), and Atlas (“another one of my portfolio companies”). ChatGPT lands in C tier; Apple Intelligence gets the F. The closing line of the video pitches viewers to message “YouTube stack” on Instagram to get his “entire AI tech stack.”

There is no specific income claim — no “$10,000 a month in 30 days.” Instead, the framing is qualitative: Apex is “the most valuable thing I use on a daily basis,” Revio “makes me the most money,” Atlas “will make you the most money” if you take phone calls. The thumbnail and title carry the income promise; the body delivers a ranked product placement.

To Martell’s credit, he discloses each ownership stake verbally when he names the tool. That matters. It does not, on its own, undo the problem that a video sold as “I tested 500 tools, here are the winners” is, by any honest accounting, also an ad for his own holdings.

What the method actually requires

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides are explicit: an endorser must disclose any “material connection” to a brand, and a financial stake in the company being recommended is the textbook example of a material connection. The FTC carves out one narrow exception — if the audience already knows the brand belongs to the influencer, separate disclosure isn’t strictly required. The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority takes a stricter line. ASA guidance says that “where an influencer is promoting their own brand or products that they’ve collaborated in the creation of, such content also falls within the ASA’s remit,” and that promotional posts must be “obviously identifiable” as ads — typically with an upfront “#ad” label, not a verbal aside mid-video. In May 2024 the ASA ruled against U.K. creator Grace Beverley for unmarked posts promoting her own brand Tala, a useful reminder that owning the company you’re promoting doesn’t reduce the disclosure obligation in every market the video reaches.

The next gap is cost. Martell talks about AI tools the way someone talks about hammers — pick one and start swinging. Real-world bills don’t behave that way. Anthropic’s public pricing page lists Claude Pro at $17 a month with annual billing and the Max plan starting at $100 a month, before you touch the API. API usage for Claude Opus 4.7 is $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — a workflow generating, say, 500,000 output tokens a day runs around $375 a month on its own. Gum Loop, Higsfield.ai, Whisper Flow, Granola, and most of the tools in the A and S tiers each carry their own subscription. A small operator running Martell’s “S tier” stack will likely spend $200-$600 a month on software before any business activity has happened. Independent reporting from Reuters via VentureBeat backs up the figure he quotes — Anthropic’s run-rate revenue did cross $30 billion in April 2026 — but that revenue is overwhelmingly enterprise, with more than 1,000 customers spending over $1 million a year on Claude. The companies getting “rich” off these tools are mostly the ones selling them.

The third gap, the biggest, is the work. The video closes with a thought Martell almost throws away: “lean into being a director… let the AI do the loop.” That is the entire ballgame, and it is not free. Directing an AI well requires a clear business model, a defined customer, a working sales channel, and the judgment to know what good output looks like. None of that comes in the box.

Who actually wins this game

The realistic winners with this toolset fall into three buckets.

The first is established knowledge-work operators. JPMorgan Chase Institute’s December 2025 research on small-business AI use found employer firms adopted AI at roughly 26.1% versus 15.3% for non-employers, with the heaviest adoption in information (39.3%), professional services (30.3%), and education (29.5%). Construction sat at 8.9%; transportation at 5.4%. The pattern is consistent: businesses that already sell time and expertise compound the most from AI; businesses built on physical labor or thin margins compound the least.

The second is the AI vendors themselves. Anthropic going from $9 billion to $30 billion in run-rate revenue in a few months is the cleanest evidence available that, at this stage of the cycle, the surest way to get rich from AI tools is to sell one. Martell, who runs a holding company stacked with AI startups, is playing exactly that game.

The third is creators and consultants with an audience. A tier-list video that recommends a creator’s own portfolio companies — verbally disclosed, then ranked highly — is itself a monetization vehicle. That isn’t unusual in 2026; it’s standard creator-economy practice. It just isn’t “I tested 500 AI tools and these are the best.”

What you’d realistically earn

The video offers no income figure, so the honest answer is contingent. If you’re a freelancer or consultant billing $75-$200 an hour who adopts two or three of these tools to save five hours a week, the math is straightforward: 5 hours × $100 × 4 weeks = $2,000 in recovered time per month, against perhaps $100-$250 in tool spend. That is a real return, not a “rich” return.

If you’re a beginner without an existing business, the realistic earnings from picking up an AI stack and waiting for income are roughly $0 for the first six months — possibly longer. The tools amplify whatever distribution, expertise, or audience you already have. Without those inputs, the output is mostly token spend and unfinished projects. Investopedia’s primer on return on investment is a useful sobering reference: ROI is a ratio of net profit to cost, and a stack that costs $300 a month but generates no revenue has an ROI of negative one hundred percent, not zero.

If you’re a small-team founder running a service business, the JPMorgan Chase Institute data points the right direction: adopters in knowledge industries see meaningful efficiency gains, but the median small business is now spending about $28-$30 a month on AI services — not the $400+ implied by Martell’s S-tier stack. For more grounded reading lists on what AI can actually pay you, our breakdown of how to use AI in your business in 2026 and the survey of five ways to make money in 2026 with AI cover the playbook without the tier-list theatrics.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This video is genuinely useful if you already run a service business or content operation, you can spend $200-$500 a month on tools without flinching, and you have the time to learn to “direct” an AI rather than copy-paste from it. The S-tier mainstream picks — Claude, Gemini, Gum Loop — are defensible recommendations on the merits, and the workflow advice in the closing minute (stay in one tool, let it complete the last step, judge outputs) is solid.

It is not for someone with no business and no audience hoping a tool will produce one. It is also not for anyone using the tier list as buying advice without noticing that Apex, Frank, BuddyPro, Social Sweep, Revio, and Atlas are all Martell’s own. Treat those as paid placements with personal endorsement, not as independent rankings. The mainstream picks you can take more or less at face value; the portfolio picks deserve the same scrutiny you’d give any product pitched by its owner.

What to remember

The video is closer to a curated catalog from a tool-builder than an independent review. The “make you rich” headline does the heavy lifting; the disclosures do the rest. AI tools are demonstrably valuable for the right operator, but the value flows to people who already have a business to plug them into, not to viewers who buy the stack and wait.

View counts and creator claims may have changed since this article was published.