12 Best Directories to Submit Your Startup in 2026

Quick answer

Directories are not interchangeable. Each one does a specific job, and submitting to the wrong job wastes an afternoon:

• Launch with a lasting page and link: SaasHunt — free submission with a dofollow backlink after badge verification, ranked daily, weekly and monthly.
• Permanent listing, no launch: Launching Next.
• Before release: BetaList.
• Comparison and buyer research: SaaSHub, AlternativeTo, G2, Capterra.
• Traffic bursts: Uneed, Product Hunt.
• Niche: There's An AI For That for AI, DevHunt for developer tools.
• Revenue: AppSumo, if margins survive a lifetime deal.

If you have one afternoon: SaasHunt, Launching Next and one comparison profile. That covers launch, link and evaluation.

Key takeaways

• Google treats nofollow, ugc and sponsored as hints, not guarantees — check the live HTML before counting on a link.
• A permanent dofollow page beats a higher-authority nofollow mention for SEO, but both beat nothing.
• Pre-launch and post-launch directories are not interchangeable.
• Twelve listings you maintain beat fifty you forget.
• Track each submission, verification step and live URL in one sheet. It is the only way to know what worked.

Disclosure

SaasHunt publishes this list and appears in it. We apply the same four criteria to our platform as to every other entry, and we flag the cases where a competitor is honestly the better fit.

How to use this ranking

Group by the job, then pick one per group you need:

1. Launch — SaasHunt, Product Hunt.
2. Permanent listing — Launching Next, SaaSHub.
3. Evaluation — AlternativeTo, G2, Capterra.
4. Niche — TAAFT, DevHunt.

Sequencing matters more than quantity: pre-launch directories before release, launch boards during launch week, comparison profiles after people can actually buy.

The twelve, grouped by job

Launch platforms

1. SaasHunt — SaaS-only launch directory, DR 64. Free Launch at $0 with a dofollow link after badge verification (site at DR 20 or higher, queue up to 270 days). Premium $9.9 for a scheduled date, Premium Plus $12.9 for the earliest date plus a featured embed and 14-day promotion, SEO Growth $49 adds a review article. Launches go live at 08:00 UTC and carry into weekly and monthly rankings. Submit here.

2. Product Hunt — the largest single-day launch audience. Free, with paid promotion. Best when you have a network for the first six hours.

11. DevHunt — weekly board for developer tools. Free, paid options from $19. Only useful if the product is developer-facing.

Permanent listings

3. Launching Next — an evergreen directory of upcoming startups. Free submission, permanent page, dofollow link, five-minute form. No voting, no community, quiet compounding.

4. BetaList — pre-launch discovery for early adopters. Paid only, refunded when a startup is not selected. Submit before release, not after.

5. Uneed — daily discovery plus newsletter. Free queue exists but can be assigned months out; paid fast lanes from $14.99.

7. Indie Hackers — a founder community with a product directory attached. Free, but the directory is invisible without participation; the forum post is the actual channel.

Comparison and evaluation

6. AlternativeTo — crowd-sourced alternatives with nofollow links. Valuable for the "alternative to X" visitor, not for link equity. Moderation can reject listings it cannot verify.

8. SaaSHub — SaaS catalog with alternatives and comparison pages. Free listing; dofollow reserved for the paid tier. Review takes two to three weeks.

10. G2 and Capterra — review platforms where buyers shortlist. Free profiles, paid sponsorship for visibility. They take months to accumulate reviews, so claim them early.

Niche

9. There's An AI For That — the largest AI tool index, organised by task. Free basic listing, paid priority. Only for AI products.

12. AppSumo — lifetime-deal marketplace. Revenue share, no upfront fee, deep discounts expected. It is a sales channel, not a directory.

The one asset set every form asks for

Build this once and reuse it everywhere:

• Tagline under 60 characters
• Description around 100 words, leading with who it is for
• 3 to 5 screenshots at 1280×800
• Square logo at 256×256 or larger
• Live URL, plus a pricing page
• Maker profile and social links
• Closest category — the single most consequential choice on any form

About an hour of work covers all twelve platforms. The category is the part people rush, and it decides which neighbours you compete against.

Requirements differ more than the forms do

The forms look similar. The gates do not.

Two rows in that table cause most of the wasted effort:

• Pre-launch submissions to post-launch platforms. A landing page with "coming soon" is rejected by every directory that expects a working product. BetaList is the only one on the list built for that stage.
• Free submissions to platforms whose free tier is invisible. If unpaid listings are pushed below paid placements, the form takes ten minutes and returns nothing. Check an existing free listing before you submit.

A 30-day submission calendar

That is roughly twelve hours of work across a month, most of it in the first week. Spreading it out matters: submissions land while the product story is still improving, and profiles that go live earlier start compounding sooner.

Why submissions get rejected

In rough order of frequency:

1. No working product. A waitlist page, a broken demo link, or a login wall with no way in.
2. Wrong category. Submitting a B2B tool under "AI writing" to look bigger puts you next to irrelevant products.
3. Duplicate listing. The product is already in the directory under an older name or domain.
4. Unverifiable ownership. No domain email, no badge, no DNS record — the platform cannot confirm you own the product.
5. Marketing language with no substance. "Revolutionary platform" reads as empty, and human reviewers reject empty.
6. Unrelated to the directory. A consumer app submitted to a developer-tools board.

Every one of those is preventable in an afternoon of preparation.

The tracking sheet

Four columns do the whole job:

Add a fifth column for "verified link type" if SEO is the goal, and revisit it at 90 days. Most abandoned directory campaigns look abandoned because nobody wrote down which pages went live.

The submission order that works

Submitting to G2 in week one is a common mistake: reviews take months, and a profile with no reviews converts poorly.

How to check a link in 30 seconds

1. Open an existing product page on the directory.
2. Right-click the outbound product link and choose Inspect.
3. Read the rel attribute. nofollow, ugc or sponsored means it does not pass authority.
4. Check that the anchor points to your domain directly, not through a redirect domain.
5. Recheck in 90 days. Listings get downgraded, and pages get removed.

Google treats these attributes as hints rather than absolute rules, but assuming a link passes when it does not is how founders end up disappointed with a directory campaign.

What actually happens after you submit

• Approval: minutes to weeks, mostly depending on whether a human reviews it.
• Indexing: days to weeks before the page appears in search.
• Traffic: a spike in launch week, then a long tail that depends on category pages ranking.
• Link: appears at publication; value accrues monthly if it stays live.

Set a reminder for 90 days. Check every live URL, fix anything that broke, and delete the ones that vanished. A directory profile is only an asset while it exists.

Frequently asked questions

Which directories are free and dofollow?

SaasHunt grants dofollow on approval, including the free tier, and Launching Next is free and permanent. DevHunt also passes value. Everything else varies by tier and listing type, so check the live HTML.

How many directories should I submit to?

Three to six, chosen for different jobs. More listings do not produce more rankings; they produce more forms to maintain.

Are directory backlinks still worth it in 2026?

Yes as citations, referring domains and referral traffic — and they increasingly feed AI answer engines that describe products from what they read. They are not a substitute for content and product quality.

Do paid submissions pay off?

Only when they remove a specific obstacle: a queue, a missing dofollow link, or a lack of visibility. SaasHunt Premium at $9.9 is the cheapest example; AppSumo takes a revenue share instead.

What should I prepare before submitting anywhere?

Tagline, 100-word description, 3–5 screenshots at 1280×800, a 256px logo, a live URL with pricing, and a maker profile. Reuse it across forms and only change the opening sentence.

Which directory brings the most signups?

It depends on the audience match, and you cannot know before you try. Instrument signups by source, then double down on the two that produced anything.

Should I submit to Product Hunt as well?

Yes, once. Product Hunt gives reach that no smaller board matches; SaasHunt and Launching Next give the durable page and link. They solve different problems, and the order matters less than doing both.

What if my product is already listed somewhere?

Claim the existing profile rather than creating a second one. Duplicates get merged or removed, and you lose the older URL. If the old listing has a wrong name, most platforms let you request an edit rather than a resubmission.

Why do some directories ask for a badge or DNS record?

Ownership verification. SaasHunt's free tier asks for its badge, SaaSHub asks for a domain email, and others check DNS. It is the cheapest way for a platform to keep scraped entries out, and it takes a few minutes to satisfy.

Should I submit to G2 before I have reviews?

Submit early, promote later. The profile takes days to approve, but the review count takes months, so the profile should exist while you collect your first ten customers rather than after.

Is it worth submitting to directories that are clearly low quality?

No. A link from an unrelated, unmoderated site adds a referring domain that does not help you rank and can look like a paid link pattern. Three relevant listings beat twenty irrelevant ones.

How do I handle a rejection?

Fix the most likely cause — usually the product page or the category — and resubmit once, with a short note. A second rejection from the same directory usually means the fit is wrong, not the submission.

Where to start

Do the durable half first — a launch with a page that persists, then a free permanent listing, then a comparison profile once there are customers to review you.

Submit your startup to SaasHunt — free if the domain qualifies, $9.9 if you need a date — then add Launching Next the same afternoon. For the wider directory landscape, read the top SaaS directories list.