Startup directories, rated and tracked

What a directory listing is worth

Three things, in descending order of certainty. A link to your site from a domain that search engines already trust, which is what a new domain needs most and can get nowhere else for free. A page about your product that ranks for its own name within days, so that a person who heard of you and searched finds something. And, on a few of them, actual visitors: people who read launch platforms to find new things, and people who read review sites to choose between them.

The ratings on the list are the first of those. The 37 entries rated 70 and above are the ones whose link is worth an afternoon; below about 40 the link is worth little and the listing is worth what its readers are, which is often nothing. The Board sits where its rating puts it, and says so.

The order to do them in

1. The records first: Crunchbase, Wellfound, F6S. They are how the rest of the web checks that a company exists, and they take ten minutes each.
2. The directories that take a listing any day: AlternativeTo, SaaSHub, SourceForge, StackShare and the category sites. No date, no queue, done in an afternoon.
3. The review sites once you have ten customers who will write one: G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, Trustpilot. An empty review profile is worse than none.
4. The launch platforms on a date you choose: Product Hunt, Hacker News, Peerlist, Uneed, BetaList. These are events, not listings, and they reward a page that already has everything above in place.
5. The board last, or first, depending on what you want. A spot here from a dollar is a public position with a public count of impressions and clicks, and it is the one list on this page where the order is decided by what you pay.

What to have ready

Every form on the list asks for the same six things. Prepare them once and paste.

• A name and a one-line description of under sixty characters that says what the thing does, not what it is called.
• A longer description of about fifty words, and another of about two hundred, for the sites that want one.
• A logo as a square PNG at 512 pixels, on a transparent ground and on a white one.
• Three screenshots at 1280 by 800, and one at 1200 by 630 for the share card, which the link preview checker on this site will test.
• A category, chosen from the site's list, and five tags.
• Founder names, a launch date, a price, and a support address that is read.

How the ratings work

The figure beside each site is Ahrefs' Domain Rating, a measure from 0 to 100 of how strong the site's backlink profile is compared with every other site Ahrefs knows, on a logarithmic scale. A site rated 80 is not twice a site rated 40; it is many times over. The figures were read on 7 September 2026 and will drift; the date is on the page so you know how old they are.

It is the one number on this list that is not ours and not the directory's. A directory's own figures for its audience are marketing. Its rating is a fact about the rest of the web, published by somebody with no stake in the answer.

Which are worth paying for

64 of the 70 list a product for nothing. The paid options fall into three kinds, and only one of them is usually worth it.

• Paying to skip a queue on a free platform, as on BetaList or Uneed. Worth it when the launch has a date it has to hit, not otherwise.
• Paying for a featured slot on a directory. Rarely worth it: the feature is seen by the directory's readers, and the directory's readers are mostly other founders submitting.
• Paying for a position that is public and priced by rank, which is what the board is. Worth it when the position sends clicks, which every listing counts on its face.

The mistakes that get a submission ignored

• A description that says what the product is instead of what it does. Every directory is read by somebody scanning for the thing that solves their problem.
• A logo that is a screenshot, or a wordmark on a coloured ground that becomes illegible at 32 pixels.
• Submitting to a launch platform on a day you cannot be there. Launches are conversations, and an unanswered comment thread is a launch that did not happen.
• Posting the same paragraph to a community. Hacker News and Reddit remove it, and they remember.
• Not claiming the profile a review site made for you. Somebody else's review lands on a page nobody is watching.

The board's own row

The Board is on the list because a list of places to be listed that left out the one we run would be a stranger list than one that says so. It is marked as ours, it is sorted by its rating like every other row, and the rating is the one Ahrefs gives it, which is low, because the site is new. What a spot here offers that the rest of the list does not is a position with a public price and a public count of the impressions and clicks it has earned, from a dollar.

Questions people ask about a startup directories

More free tools

All of them are on the free tools page. Every one is free, asks for no account, and stores nothing of yours on our side. A listing on The Board is a logo, a line and a link, from $1, and every number on the board is public.