Startup Directories: Which Ones Are Worth Your Time

What a startup directory actually is

It's a site that lists startups and their products. You fill in a form — product name, one-line pitch, URL, logo, screenshots — and it builds you a page.

Sounds like a 2012 thing. It isn't dead, for two reasons.

First, Google. Most of these are old domains sitting at DR 60 to 90. Your page lives on one of them and Google crawls it. Someone searching "best tool for X" lands on a directory page, and sometimes clicks through to you. It's slow, but it keeps working.

Second, people really do browse them. Investors check Crunchbase. Journalists check F6S. Anyone writing a comparison post checks AlternativeTo and SaaSHub. If you're not there, they can't write about you.

The problem is that "startup directory" now gets used for three different things, and most list posts mix them together:

• Launch platforms — Product Hunt, Uneed, Micro Launch. There's a leaderboard and a launch day. You get a traffic spike, then the page sinks. Running one of these is its own job — we've covered it in the Product Hunt launch playbook and in 15 Product Hunt alternatives with real numbers.
• Evergreen directories — F6S, SourceForge, AlternativeTo. No launch day. Submit whenever. The page builds up Google traffic over months.
• Submission directories — a long tail of sites you've never heard of. Fill a form, get listed. Each one is worth very little on its own, but they're cheap.

Know which kind you're submitting to before you decide how much effort to spend. A full day of prep for Product Hunt, five minutes for a submission directory. Lots of people get this backwards and spend an hour writing a careful listing for a site with 400 monthly visitors.

This guide only covers the ones worth writing about. If you want the whole set, filterable by DR and monthly traffic, we keep a directory of 500+ submission sites with pricing, link type, and first-hand submission notes on each one.

Are they still worth it

Depends where you are.

Just launched, nothing yet: yes, and it's the best use of an afternoon. You need Google to know you exist at all. Going from zero backlinks to a dozen is fastest through directories. You can do seven or eight in one sitting.

Already have steady traffic: be picky. One DR 60 directory link barely moves your rankings now. But still do the comparison-style ones — AlternativeTo, SaaSHub — because your competitors are already there. If you're missing, anyone searching "X alternatives" never sees you.

Building B2B: reorder the list. Crunchbase and F6S matter more to you than Product Hunt. Buyers google your company name before a sales call. Finding nothing costs you trust immediately. Past that, review sites beat directories by a wide margin, and they're a different game — see how to submit to G2 and the Capterra submission guide.

Building a pure consumer app: most of these won't help. Do two or three high-DR ones for basic SEO and put the rest of your time into app store listings and social.

One case where it's clearly not worth it: trying to rank by submitting to 200 directories. That worked in 2015. Google now gives directory links very little weight, and a backlink profile full of junk directories is a negative signal on its own. Twenty real ones beat two hundred bad ones.

Get your assets together first

The forms all ask for the same things. Prep once and each site becomes a five-minute copy-paste job. Skip the prep and you'll be hunting for a logo file on site number three, and you'll quit by site five.

Three descriptions, three lengths. This is the important one:

• One line, under 60 characters. For tagline fields.
• One paragraph, 150 to 200 characters. For "short description".
• One long block, 400 to 600 characters. For the listing body.

Write three different ones. Don't just truncate the long one. Directory pages are thin to begin with. Paste identical text everywhere and Google reads them as duplicates and skips indexing all of them. Then the whole effort was for nothing.

Images. Square logo (512×512, transparent PNG), a wide banner (1200×630 — Product Hunt and social previews both want that size), and two or three screenshots. Don't screenshot an empty app. Fill it with real-looking data first.

An email on your product's domain. Something like hi@yourdomain.com. SaaSHub and others require it for verification and won't take Gmail. Set it up before you start, since DNS changes take time to propagate.

A competitor list. AlternativeTo and SaaSHub both ask, and your answer decides which listings you appear in. Pick 3 to 5 names people actually search for. Picking obscure ones puts you on pages nobody visits.

A tracking sheet. Site, date submitted, approved or not, listing URL, dofollow or nofollow. Five columns. Without it you'll have no idea three months later what to check, or which sites wasted your time.

The free ones worth doing, in three tiers

Tier 1: high DR, free, submit and forget

These are the ones I'd tell anyone to do first:

• F6S — DR 86, 1.6M monthly visits, free, dofollow. An old startup-scene site where investors and accelerators genuinely look for companies. Company info has to be real and in English. No placeholders.
• SourceForge — DR 92, 2.5M monthly visits. You need an account before you can submit. It lists software, so your product should be clearly a tool. If you're selling a service, skip it. The form is longer than most, and the SourceForge submission guide walks through it.
• The SaaS Directory — DR 88, free, dofollow. Straightforward if you're SaaS.
• TechDirectory — DR 67, free, dofollow, short form, fast approval. A ten-minute job. Don't expect traffic. Treat it as one clean high-DR link.
• Startup Fame — DR 83, dofollow. It wants you to put their badge on your homepage before you get listed. Think about that trade. A DR 83 dofollow link for one badge slot is usually fine. If your homepage already has seven badges on it, you're starting to look desperate. It also runs a daily leaderboard — the Startup Fame submission guide covers how to take the top spot.

Tier 2: the ones with real traffic

Fill these in carefully. People will actually see them.

• Product Hunt — DR 75, 6M monthly visits. The link is nofollow, and that's fine — you're there for the day of exposure. Launch at 12:01 AM Pacific so you get the full day. Never publicly ask for upvotes. PH strips those votes and can bury your rank. Write your assets and your first comment ahead of time. There's no room to improvise on launch day. For the full timeline and how to run the day itself, read the Product Hunt launch playbook.
• Crunchbase — DR 80, 10M monthly visits, nofollow. Needs social verification. The point isn't the link. It's that someone googling your company name finds a real profile.
• AlternativeTo — DR 80, 1.3M monthly visits, dofollow. You list yourself as an alternative to existing tools. A fresh entry with no likes sits at the bottom forever, so pick 2 to 3 well-known competitors, fill the page out fully (platforms, license, screenshots), and get a few users to like it. That's what gets you visible in those lists.
• SaaSHub — DR 68, 1.6M monthly visits, dofollow. You need to name competitors and verify with an email on your product's domain.
• Uneed — 252K monthly visits, $30. They cap it at 30 products a day, so expect a queue.

Tier 3: small, fast, do a batch

Nothing here looks impressive on DR or traffic alone, but the forms are quick. Good for knocking out a batch in one sitting:

• Launching Next — DR 51. Free submissions wait in line. Fine if you're not in a hurry.
• Startup Base — DR 50, free. Very little traffic. This one's for the link.
• Startup Buffer — DR 39. Everything has to be in English.
• Micro Launch — DR 19, but 60K monthly visits. A clean example of DR and traffic pointing different directions. You go here for people, not links.
• OpenHunts and Today Launches — DR 56 and 60, free, dofollow.
• PitchWall — 59K monthly visits. Submissions that are obviously just SEO plays don't get approved. It has to read like a real product.
• Startups.fyi — submissions go through a Tally form. With form-hosted submissions, check afterwards that a page actually got created.

Two more that aren't general directories but are worth naming: Land-book is a curated landing-page gallery with a human reviewer, so don't waste the submission if your page looks rough. SideProjectors is for buying and selling side projects, which only makes sense if you're thinking about selling.

Land-book's whole category is less crowded than general directories, mostly because few people will spend two extra days on a landing page. That makes acceptance rates better than you'd expect. We wrote it up separately in the underrated design and portfolio sites.

The paid ones, and when to pay

• BetaList, $99. DR 70, 180K monthly visits. No free lane anymore. Worth it depends on whether your product is early, novel, and looks like a beta. BetaList readers show up looking for new things. A good fit gets a few hundred real signups. A bad fit spends $99 for twenty visits.
• Startup Stash, from $199/year. DR 65, 370K monthly visits. It only takes startup tools. If you're not building something for founders, skip it.
• Uneed, $30. Cheapest of the three and the most honest about what it is: buying one shot of exposure.

Here's the test I use. Is the money buying a place in line, or buying a spot? Paying to skip the queue on a site that would list you free anyway is usually not worth it — two extra weeks won't hurt you. Paying for a spot you can't get otherwise (front page, newsletter placement, a listing that free users never get) is the only version worth arguing about.

After you submit: check whether the listing did anything

This is the part to read twice.

Most people submit and walk away. Three months later they say directories don't work. Usually what happened is this: the page got created and Google never indexed it. An unindexed page contributes exactly zero to your SEO.

Three steps, thirty seconds per site.

Step 1: check the page exists. Open your listing. Is the content right? Does the link point to you? Some sites send a "pending review" email and then nothing ever happens.

Step 2: check Google indexed it. Search:

site:example.com/your-listing-page

Nothing comes back means it isn't indexed. Then check the whole domain:

site:example.com

If the entire site only has a few hundred pages in Google, that site has an indexing problem and your page probably isn't going to make it either. Cross it off and don't submit there again.

Step 3: check the link type. On your listing page, view source and search for your domain. Look at the <a> tag — is there a rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc" on it?

And while we're here: nofollow is not the disaster people treat it as. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint, not a rule, and decides for itself. More to the point, a nofollow link still sends real clicks and still tells Google your brand exists. Product Hunt and Crunchbase are both nofollow and nobody sensible skips them.

The thing to avoid isn't nofollow. It's sites that nobody reads and Google doesn't index. That's the actual waste of time.

Side by side

Common mistakes

• Fifty submissions in one day. A backlink curve that goes vertical overnight is a suspicious pattern by itself. Spread it over a few weeks. Three to five a day is plenty.
• Submitting before you've launched. A reviewer clicking through to a "Coming soon" page rejects you. And most sites won't let the same domain resubmit after a rejection.
• Picking a category carelessly. The category page is the page that actually ranks on these sites. Pick the wrong one and you land on a page nobody searches for. Spend thirty seconds looking at what's already in each category and pick the closest fit.
• Listing the wrong competitors on AlternativeTo. Listing yourself under an obscure tool gets you nothing. You want the name people really type into the search box.
• Not checking form-hosted submissions. If the form runs on Typeform or Tally, the high DR you saw belongs to the form platform, not the directory. Go back and confirm a real page exists.

FAQ

Do startup directories still help SEO?

Yes, but they're not your main channel. What they do is take you from zero to a base layer of backlinks and get your brand into Google's index. Expecting them to move keyword rankings isn't realistic.

How many should I do?

Twenty to thirty real ones beats two hundred filler ones. Judge each by three things: is the site alive, do its pages get indexed, and does its audience overlap with your users.

What's the difference between free and paid?

Mostly you're paying to skip a queue or to get a placement you can't get free. Free lanes usually mean "you'll get listed, but slowly and lower down". BetaList is the exception — there's no free lane at all now.

How long does approval take?

Automatic sites: minutes. Human review: one to four weeks. Free queues on paid sites: sometimes a month or two. Don't chase them, it doesn't help.

Should I bother with nofollow sites?

Yes. See the section above. The question to ask is whether people read it and whether Google indexes it — not dofollow versus nofollow.

My product isn't in English. Can I still submit?

Most international directories require English throughout, including the product name and description. Startup Buffer and F6S both say so directly. Non-English listings get rejected.

Is Indie Hackers a startup directory?

No, it's a community, and the links are nofollow. Worth your time, but for conversations and early users, not for backlinks. Posting there has its own rules — see the Indie Hackers posting guide.

I built a web app / PWA. Will these sites take it?

Yes. Directories don't care whether you're native or web. They just want a URL you can click, which is the one place a PWA has the advantage. App stores are the harder part — that's covered in where to post your PWA for free.

Other places to hit in the same week

While you're already doing this, these use the exact same assets:

• Startup Ranking — DR 67. The free review queue is long, so get in early.
• Micro Launch — mentioned above. Low DR, real people.
• Land-book — throw your landing page in if it looks good. Getting accepted brings solid referral traffic from designers.
• TechDirectory — ten minutes, one clean dofollow.

To filter the whole set by DR, monthly traffic, and price, two category pages do the job: startup submission sites and general directories. Building SaaS? Also check SaaS directories — those lean toward software comparison pages, and the traffic they send converts better than a general listing.

For step-by-step walkthroughs of individual sites, we write those up one at a time. They're all in the submission guides index.