About Toolfound

What this site is

A field guide to new software. The footer line is the short version: a transparent queue, real numbers, and no pay-to-win theatre. You can read the index, the launch boards and the guides without an account. Submitting a product, claiming a listing or voting means you accept the terms.

The same index is published as HTML, as structured data on listing pages, through an MCP server, and in the API. The methodology is the page that records how positions, medals and indexing are decided. The listing policy is the page that records how a product gets in and how it gets taken down.

Who runs it

Toolfound is made by Mel Owen. Questions about a listing, a removal, or these pages go to hello@toolfound.com. The privacy page does not name a different controller.

How a listing gets in

There are two routes into the index, and every page says which one it took.

• Submitted and domain-verified. Someone who can prove control of the domain submits the product, either through the form or through an agent. Nothing publishes before the domain check passes. The check is a one-time link to an address on the product domain, or a meta tag, or a DNS TXT record.
• Compiled from public information. The entry is built from the product’s own public website and from open datasets. Descriptions are written for this index. They are not copied from other directories. Screenshots and logos are fetched once from the product’s own site and self-hosted.

A listing is marked indexable only when it has an original description over a hundred words, an image (a screenshot, a logo, or the fetched preview image), at least one category, and a status of launched or seeded. Anything below that renders with a noindex tag. That rule, and the reason for it, is in the methodology section on indexing.

Unclaimed listings

A compiled entry is labelled unclaimed everywhere it appears. The label tells a reader, and an assistant citing the page, that nobody at the company has confirmed a word of it. Unclaimed listings cannot use badges, cannot be flagged for sale, and are held to the same indexing threshold as everything else.

An unclaimed listing that nobody has verified or claimed is also capped at an AI listing score of 5. A complete catalogue entry does not outrank a maker who has verified the page and collected votes. The score itself is described below.

Claiming and removal

Claiming is free. It takes a one-time link sent to an address on the product’s own domain, or a meta tag or DNS TXT record. Claiming unlocks editing, the analytics for the page, badge access and the acquisition flag.

Removal is a promise, not a negotiation. Email hello@toolfound.com from an address on the product’s domain with the listing URL. The listing is removed within 48 hours. There is no form, no retention offer, and you do not have to claim the page first. Removal means the page returns a 404 and the entry leaves the sitemap, the API, the MCP read tools and the newsletter. A record of the request is kept so a later import does not recreate the listing. The full wording is in the listing policy, under “The removal promise” and “Delisting and corrections” on the methodology page.

How ranking works

Boards are sorted by points, descending, with the more recent launch breaking a tie. Points are community votes plus an AI listing score between 3 and 10. The score is computed from the listing itself: description depth, an image, a category, verification, a stated pricing model, a tagline and a linked X account. It is not a vote. Nobody can buy it or request it. It is recomputed from the listing every night. The tool page shows the two parts separately.

An editor’s pick is a labelled editorial choice. It is not a vote and it does not move points. Daily, weekly and monthly boards use the same sort over the last 1, 7 and 30 days of launch dates. A tool can appear on all three at once. The top three positions on a board carry a seal. Positions below three carry only the number.

Verified connected data does not change points or board order on the main boards. It only fills the verified-data boards, which are ordered by size and appear only once 10 listings have data of that kind.

Votes follow four rules:

• One vote per person per tool, keyed on the server from the request signature.
• Votes are not weighted by account age, by who cast them, or by anything else.
• Votes stay counted after the launch day ends. Boards are records, not countdowns.
• Vote counts are hidden for the first 4 hours after a launch opens (13:00 UTC). The day’s order is a stable shuffle until then.

The free queue

The free queue takes 5 launches a day. A submission takes the next date with room on it. Its position within the day is the order in which submissions verified their domain. Both the date and the position are shown before you verify, and neither moves afterwards.

A launched listing can relaunch once it has been live at least 30 days, and at most once every 30 days after that. A relaunch is the same listing at the same URL with a new launch date. The board only counts votes cast from the new date onward. The original launch date, its closing vote count, and every earlier relaunch stay on the page.

What money cannot buy

Priority Launch and Toolfound Plus can change the launch date. They never change position within the day, votes, or ranking. Featured seats are a smaller number per day than the free queue. A featured seat changes where the listing is shown on its launch day. It does not change points, board position, or the link.

• Money can buy an earlier launch date, more exposure, and a labelled sponsor slot. Those links to the product’s site carry rel="sponsored nofollow". Launching itself stays free.
• Money cannot buy a position on any board, a vote, a category placement, a medal, removal of a competitor, or a change to another product’s listing.
• A free verified listing gets a followed link to the product. That link is never conditioned on a badge or a link back. Badges are optional. The default badge snippet uses rel="nofollow", and the site does not crawl your site to check whether you embed one.

How guide rows are checked

The comparison guides state, for each platform, whether a listing is free and whether the link to your site is dofollow. Those cells are checked, not copied from the platform’s marketing. For each row the check fetches the submit page for its status code and the exact free path, then fetches a real listing page with a browser user agent and reads the rel attribute on the anchor that points at the listed product. No nofollow, ugc or sponsored value on a direct link counts as dofollow. A link that goes through a redirect or tracker does not.

Pages that render only in the browser are marked unverifiable and left out rather than guessed. Where a site blocks automated access, the rel attribute is read on the Internet Archive’s stored copy of the listing page, and that snapshot date is the verification date. Every row shows the date it was last checked. The visible “last updated” stamp on a guide is the newest of those dates, never the day the page was served.

How ranking works has the full ranking, indexing and verification rules. Listing policy has the removal promise. Submit a tool is free and does not ask you to log in first.

I build Toolfound.