Whoops I kept meaning to come back to this thread and follow up + update my stack/process, but time keeps getting away from me, apologies!
There's been some new contenders in the AI writing space since the last time I wrote, and I've been trying a few out--most aren't any better than the other solutions on the market. However, I currently have a new favorite:
Bertha.ai
I grabbed a lifetime copy of the Agency plan at the beginning of the year, and it's put out the highest quality content with the least effort of all the tools I've tried so far. The only downside(?) is that it only integrates with WordPress, and gives you a "write anywhere" feature where you can feed it a mini-prompt and get content written directly on your sites. It's been making my site building process so much faster, and the content I get back has been astonishingly well written.
Outranking
Outranking also released V7, and I'm really liking the output it provides - especially when I'm needing factual info. It still takes a bit of tweaking but overall I really like their approach.
Scalenut
I wasn't a fan of Scalenut so I refunded it. It was alright but didn't seem to do anything that Outranking and others couldn't do.
Texta.ai
I also got texta.ai - it reminds me of Writesonic (which I kind of liked back when I started this thread, but the limits were too low--it took several regenerations/tweaking to get decent content so those on the lifetime plans would burn through credits very rapidly). Texta.ai provides solid output and has much more generous limits; I don't use it all that often but they're updating fast so I'm keeping an eye on it.
ContentVillain
Development has been stagnant, which has been sad to see, but the developer has been updating recently that they've been making changes to the core of the system and should be able to iterate faster, so I'm still optimistic on it being one of the better ones this year (especially with the API).
Apparently GPT-NeoX-20B was just released and theyre already working on integrating it so that'll be interesting to see.
Frase
Frase is still a great tool - they've been adding some slick features so I still pay for the addon but honestly haven't been using that much between Bertha and Outranking, but I need to keep messing with it. It does provide some solid content but takes a bit of work to prep it (similar to outranking).
ClosersCopy
Still a big fan of CC, and still find myself using it for sales copy. Its blogging features are alright but the one-click still leaves a lot to be desired. The templates and community make it super powerful though. I would still highly recommend it for anyone needing a writing tool and wanting to pay a one-time fee before they get rid of it.
There were quite a few questions/discussions I missed out on - I do apologize! If anyone has any lingering questions about any of the writers I'd be happy to reply (sooner than later) if I'm able to give an accurate answer or a well-educated opinion. I'll update soon with my new process as it involves using several different writers based on needs/goals so it's gonna take some time to map out and organize.