Launch guides
46 Free Startup Directories and Launch Platforms, Compared
There are more genuinely free places to list a startup in 2026 than most roundups admit: Toolfound, Product Hunt, Hacker News, Uneed, the maker communities, and a long checklist tier of evergreen directories all cost nothing. The table below lists every platform in our index with a real free path.
Last updated September 2026
The comparison table
Two honest caveats about "free". First, several platforms pair a free tier with paid skip-the-line or featured options — the free path works, it is just slower or less prominent. Second, free directories in the checklist tier individually move nothing you will notice; their value is collective, as baseline web presence and corroborating citations. Batch them in one session and spend your real effort on the few venues where your audience actually is.
Toolfound publishes this list and is included in it — our own free tier is the first hundred launches, with a public counter.
| # | Platform | Best for | Launch model | Dofollow link | Cost | Notes | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product Hunt | Consumer and prosumer products with a polished story | Daily ranking | No | Free | The Visit website link carries rel="ugc" on the product page and on the launch post, so the prize is the day and not the link | 2026-09-06 |
| 2 | Hacker News (Show HN) | Technical products with something genuinely interesting to show | Community | Conditional | Free | Outbound title links on the same page carry mixed rel attributes with no documented rule, so the prize is traffic and feedback, not links | 2026-09-06 |
| 3 | Uneed | Indie makers who want a calmer daily board with a real link policy | Daily ranking | Yes | Free + paid skip-the-line | Smaller than the biggest boards but launches are less crowded, so odds are better | — |
| 4 | ToolfoundOur platform | Agent-native launches and a permanent, dofollow directory listing | Daily ranking | Yes | Free (first 100 launches), then paid skip-the-line | Our platform — mandatory ownership verification, public queue and launch dates | — |
| 5 | Reddit — r/SideProject | First honest feedback on a side project, before any formal launch | Community | — | Free | Come for feedback, not links; read the self-promotion rules of the sub first | — |
| 6 | Reddit — r/SaaS | SaaS founders sharing build-in-public updates and launch recaps | Community | — | Free | Recaps with real numbers outperform launch announcements here | — |
| 7 | Indie Hackers | Story-driven launches and milestone posts to an audience of founders | Community | No | Free | The forum thread is the value; product pages matter less than they used to | 2026-09-06 |
| 8 | SaaSHub | An evergreen alternatives-style listing that compounds through search | Evergreen listing | No | Free + paid options | Free listing; every outbound link we checked on live product pages is nofollow, so the value is the alternatives traffic, not the link | 2026-09-06 |
| 9 | AlternativeTo | Being discovered by people searching for alternatives to incumbents | Tool database | No | Free | The Official Website link goes through an /outgoing/ path that the site's own robots.txt disallows; crowd-moderated, and your listing gains from being an alternative to something big | 2026-09-06 |
| 10 | Fazier | Indie-friendly daily launches with an active maker community | Daily ranking | — | Free + paid options | Newer board that grew fast among makers; smaller audience, better odds | — |
| 11 | Microlaunch | Micro-SaaS and small products competing over a month, not a day | Monthly ranking | — | Free + paid options | Month-long launch window suits products without a day-one audience | — |
| 12 | Peerlist | Developers and designers launching to a professional-profile network | Weekly ranking | — | Free | Weekly launchpad inside a professional network; strong for dev-adjacent products | — |
| 13 | DevHunt | Dev tools launching to developers, run by dev-tool makers | Weekly ranking | — | Free | Open-source, niche by design; small audience but exactly the right one for dev tools | — |
| 14 | Crunchbase | Entity presence for investors, journalists, and AI knowledge graphs | Tool database | No | Free profile + paid plans | Nobody discovers you here, but everyone checks you here; the website link on the profile carries rel="nofollow", so this is entity work rather than a link | 2026-09-06 |
| 15 | F6S | Startup programs, accelerator applications, and founder deals | Tool database | Yes | Free | Free dofollow profile; the real product is program applications and startup deals | — |
| 16 | Launching Next | A quick, free evergreen listing among thousands of new startups | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free | Low effort, free dofollow listing; modest traffic, part of the checklist tier | — |
| 17 | StartupBase | Community feedback and an evergreen startup profile | Community | — | Free | Smaller maker community; the profile persists and the room is friendly | — |
| 18 | SideProjectors | Showing — or selling — a side project to other makers | Deal marketplace | — | Free | Half showcase, half marketplace for buying and selling side projects | — |
| 19 | Betabound | Recruiting structured beta testers before a public launch | Community | — | Free | A beta-tester community, not a launch venue; useful strictly pre-launch | — |
| 20 | Startup Buffer | Simple evergreen directory listing for early-stage startups | Evergreen listing | — | Free + paid options | Straightforward directory; free tier with paid expedited options | — |
| 21 | PitchWall | Daily startup showcase with community upvotes | Daily ranking | — | Free + paid options | Small daily board in the familiar format; friendly to first-time launchers | — |
| 22 | 10words | A ten-word pitch in front of a daily newsletter audience | Newsletter | — | Free | Describes startups in exactly ten words; the constraint is the product | — |
| 23 | Altern | A curated, human-reviewed listing rather than a bulk index | Tool database | Yes | Free + paid options | Free submission, sign-in with GitHub or Google, human review before publication | 2026-09-06 |
| 24 | AI Tools Up | Makers who will trade a queue wait for a free followed link | Tool database | Yes | Free + paid skip-the-line | Free tier states listing within 30 days; 19 USD fast track, 249 USD promoted | 2026-09-06 |
| 25 | AINave | A permanent product page with an optional low-cost verification | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free + paid options | Free plan lists a do-follow link; a 5 USD one-time verified badge sits above it | 2026-09-06 |
| 26 | AItoolMall | A fast free listing where brand adjacency is not a concern | Tool database | Yes | Free | Free and permissive, but adult categories sit alongside general ones sitewide | 2026-09-06 |
| 27 | AI Tool List | Developers happy to open a pull request instead of filling a form | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free | Submission is a pull request against the awesome-ai-tool-list repository | 2026-09-06 |
| 28 | ToolPilot | Nothing we would recommend without reading the link-scheme warning first | Tool database | Yes | Free + paid options | Link-scheme risk: the free listing requires a mandatory badge or link back to them | 2026-09-06 |
| 29 | FutureTools | Audience and newsletter exposure, explicitly not link equity | Tool database | No | Free | Outbound links run through /go/, which their own robots.txt disallows | 2026-09-06 |
| 30 | AI Tools (aitools.inc) | A free listing in a large category index, with a long free queue | Tool database | No | Free + paid skip-the-line | Free queue quoted at 30 to 90 days; visit button is a 301 tracker, not a direct link | 2026-09-06 |
| 31 | AI Tools Board | A free, quick listing when you want coverage rather than links | Evergreen listing | No | Free + paid skip-the-line | Free review in 5 to 7 business days, 99 USD fast track; every outbound link is nofollow | 2026-09-06 |
| 32 | Official MCP Registry | Any server that ships as an npm, PyPI, NuGet or Docker package | Evergreen listing | No | Free | CLI publish with mcp-publisher; no web form, no HTML listing page, so no link equity | 2026-09-06 |
| 33 | GitHub MCP Registry | Servers that want to show up inside VS Code and Copilot by default | Evergreen listing | No | Free | Curated: nominate by email to [email protected]; GitHub nofollows every external link | 2026-09-06 |
| 34 | Docker MCP Catalog | Containerised or remote servers that want one-click installs across several clients | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free | PR adding servers/<name>/server.yaml; permissive licence required, GPL is refused | 2026-09-06 |
| 35 | Glama MCP directory | Public GitHub repos that want to be indexed without doing anything | Evergreen listing | Conditional | Free | Auto-indexed from GitHub; the repository link is dofollow, every README link is ugc nofollow | 2026-09-06 |
| 36 | Cursor Marketplace | Servers whose users are already writing code inside Cursor | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free | Anysphere's own store, manually reviewed; do not confuse it with the community cursor.directory | 2026-09-06 |
| 37 | Claude Connectors Directory | Remote, OAuth-authenticated servers aimed at Claude users | Evergreen listing | No | Free | Submitting needs a Team or Enterprise org; no privacy policy means immediate rejection | 2026-09-06 |
| 38 | LobeHub MCP Marketplace | Servers that want a genuinely dofollow listing page with a client behind it | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free | Publish with the market CLI using GitHub OAuth, or the submit button on the site | 2026-09-06 |
| 39 | Cline MCP Marketplace | Servers that install cleanly with no human hand-holding | Evergreen listing | No | Free | Now a PR adding registry/mcps/<slug>/entry.json; the old issue queue has over 2,000 open items | 2026-09-06 |
| 40 | Gemini CLI Extensions gallery | MCP servers packaged as a Gemini CLI extension, listed with zero submission work | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free | Auto-crawled from the gemini-cli-extension GitHub topic; a CLI migration is announced, so check dates | 2026-09-06 |
| 41 | mcpservers.org | Founders who want reach and are willing to read the pricing before believing the link claim | Evergreen listing | Conditional | Free + paid options | Free listings are nofollow; a 39 dollar one-time fee buys faster review, a badge and a dofollow link | 2026-09-06 |
| 42 | mcp.so | Broad directory coverage when you are sweeping every index | Evergreen listing | Conditional | Free + paid options | Free listings are nofollow ugc; a 39 dollar one-time fee advertises a dofollow link and no review | 2026-09-06 |
| 43 | Awesome MCP Servers (punkpeye) | Getting in front of developers who browse a list instead of a registry | Evergreen listing | No | Free | Pull request adding one alphabetical line; the repo's stated homepage is the Glama directory | 2026-09-06 |
| 44 | TrustRadius | B2B buyers reading long, verified reviews late in an evaluation | Review site | Yes | Free profile + paid plans | One of the few review sites whose vendor link is a plain outbound link with no nofollow; the free listing is the entry point and the paid programs sit on top | 2026-09-06 |
| 45 | StackShare | Tools that belong in a visible engineering stack | Tool database | Yes | Free | Free tool page and the outbound link on it is dofollow; the audience is engineers comparing stacks, not buyers looking for something new | 2026-09-06 |
| 46 | GoodFirms | Software and services buyers browsing ranked category listings | Review site | No | Free + paid options | The Visit website link on a listing is rel="nofollow", so the free listing buys category exposure and not a backlink | 2026-09-06 |
Every platform, one by one
Each entry links to the platform’s own submit or FAQ page — the primary source. The full cross-segment comparison, sequencing advice and launch-day playbook live in the complete launch guide; how we source these facts is on the methodology page.
1. Product Hunt
Still the biggest general launch board, and still the one your investors will ask about. Successful launches report anywhere from a couple of thousand to over ten thousand visits in a day — but the median launch gets a small fraction of that, and without an existing network the front page is close to a lottery. The mechanics have flattened: hunters matter far less than they used to, and the work is in your first comment, your gallery, and having real users show up before noon. On an archived copy from 29 August 2026 the Visit website link carries rel="noreferrer noopener ugc" on the product page and on the launch post alike, so it passes no link value at any rank. Treat it as the finale of a launch sequence, not the opener: launch here after you have practised the pitch on smaller boards and have users who will genuinely comment.
2. Hacker News (Show HN)
The highest-variance option on this list. A Show HN that lands can outdraw every other platform here combined, and the comment thread will contain the most technically literate feedback you will ever get for free. But the audience has no patience for marketing language, growth hacks, or launches with nothing to try — read the Show HN rules before posting, because they are enforced. What works: a working demo, a plain-spoken title, a first comment explaining what is hard about the problem, and answering every question fast without defensiveness. What fails: relaunching repeatedly, engagement bait, and asking friends to upvote (voting-ring detection is real). Go here when the product is technical and genuinely works; skip it if your pitch depends on a landing page.
3. Uneed
A daily launch board run by an indie maker, and one of the platforms that popularised publishing its own launch-directory comparisons — which tells you the team understands why founders come: traffic, feedback, and a dofollow link. The daily competition is far less crowded than the biggest boards, so a good product with a small push has a real shot at the top spots, and listings persist afterwards. The free queue can mean a wait of weeks; the paid skip-the-line option exists if your date matters. The audience skews indie-maker and early-adopter, so B2B products with long sales cycles get less from it than consumer tools do. A sensible week-two launch: big enough to matter, small enough to win.
4. Toolfound
Toolfound is our platform, so read this entry knowing that. What it does differently: the entire launch lifecycle — submit, verify, track, claim — works over MCP as well as the web, so your agent can run the launch; ownership verification is mandatory for every listing; and the queue is public, so you see your exact launch date and position before you commit. Every verified listing keeps a permanent page with a dofollow link, never conditioned on a badge or a link back, which is written policy, not a promise; the page itself is indexed by search engines once its description passes 100 original words (the form and the dashboard show the counter). The honest trade-off: the audience is newer and smaller than the incumbents above and below it in this table. The first hundred launches are free, and the counter is public. If you want the biggest possible day-one spike, launch elsewhere first and here for the durable page.
5. Reddit — r/SideProject
The default first stop for indie products, and the right one: post here in week one, before any formal launch, while you can still act on what people tell you. The subreddit is large, active, and tolerant of self-promotion in a way most of Reddit is not — provided you show the actual thing, answer questions, and write like a person rather than a landing page. Expect blunt feedback and the occasional viral thread; a well-received post can send meaningful traffic for days. Do not expect link equity — treat any SEO value as zero and you will value the sub correctly, because what it actually provides is the fastest feedback loop on this list. One genuine post beats three reworded reposts, which the community notices and punishes.
6. Reddit — r/SaaS
Where SaaS founders compare notes, and a different animal from r/SideProject: the audience is other founders, not potential users, so a bare launch announcement mostly disappears. What works is the recap with real numbers — what you launched, where, what it cost, what converted — posted after the fact. Those threads get saved, cited, and surface in search and AI answers for months, which makes this one of the highest-leverage free posts in the whole sequence. The sub is strict about thinly-veiled promotion and quick to call out fake numbers or engagement bait. Post once, with data, and answer every comment. As with all of Reddit, count the SEO value as zero and the distribution value as real.
7. Indie Hackers
The community where build-in-public was more or less invented. The durable value is a milestone post that tells a true story — how you got your first paying customer, what the launch actually returned — in front of an audience of founders who read every word. Product pages exist but matter far less than the forum; the community has been through ownership changes and activity has ebbed from its peak, so calibrate expectations accordingly. The audience is founders rather than buyers, which makes it better for feedback, encouragement, and long-tail discovery than for direct signups — unless founders are your market, in which case it is one of the best rooms available. One honest, specific post; no drive-by links.
8. SaaSHub
Not a launch board — an alternatives engine. SaaSHub's pages rank for thousands of "X alternatives" and "X vs Y" queries, and a free listing puts your product inside that surface, though every outbound link we checked on live product pages was nofollow, so count it as traffic rather than link equity. Nothing dramatic happens on submission day; the value accrues slowly as your product appears beside the incumbents people are actually searching for, which is precisely the query that converts. That also defines the limit: if nobody searches for alternatives in your category, there is little surface to appear on. Paid options exist for more prominence. The right way to use it: submit once, early, fill the listing properly with real alternatives, and forget about it — it is infrastructure for the long tail, not an event.
9. AlternativeTo
One of the largest software databases on the web, and the canonical answer to "what can I use instead of X". Listings are free and crowd-moderated, but on an archived copy from 22 August 2026 the Official Website link points at an /outgoing/ path that the site's own robots.txt disallows, so no link value reaches you. The mechanism to understand: your page's traffic comes almost entirely from being listed as an alternative to something people already search for — so a listing that names its big-name alternatives honestly can pull steady, high-intent traffic for years, while a listing in a category with no famous incumbent pulls almost nothing. Because it is crowd-moderated, you do not fully control the page: users add alternatives, likes, and comments, and blatant self-promotion in the wrong places gets reverted. Submit early, be accurate about what you replace, and let it compound. AI engines cite it constantly, which is worth something on its own.
10. Fazier
A newer daily launch board that grew quickly in the indie-maker community, with launches, upvotes, comments, and badges in the familiar format. The case for it is the same as for every smaller board: fewer competitors per day means a well-prepared launch can realistically take a top spot, collect a credible badge, and get seen by an audience that actively tries new tools. The case against is symmetrical: the absolute traffic is a fraction of the biggest boards, and the audience is heavily other makers — great for feedback and early adopters, weaker for reaching mainstream buyers. Free to launch with paid promotional options. Fits naturally in week two of a stacked sequence, alongside the other launch boards, rather than carrying the whole launch alone.
11. Microlaunch
A launch platform built around a deliberately different clock: products compete over a month rather than a day. That single design choice fixes the biggest problem small products have on daily boards — losing by lunchtime to whoever brought the bigger audience. On a monthly cycle, steady trickles of genuine users accumulate into a ranking, so a good product with no launch-day army still has a chance to place. The trade-off is the mirror image: no single-day spike, less adrenaline, and a smaller overall audience than the big boards. Free to launch, with paid options for visibility. Best used by micro-SaaS and solo makers who would rather compound quietly for four weeks than gamble everything on one Tuesday.
12. Peerlist
A professional network for people in tech that runs a weekly launchpad: projects launch across the week, get upvoted, and winners are spotlighted. Because launches are attached to real professional profiles, the dynamic is less anonymous than the big boards — your launch doubles as a line on your public work history, and the audience of developers, designers, and product people is exactly right for dev tools and design tools. The weekly cycle gives slower launches room to gather votes. Limits worth knowing: the network is much smaller than the mainstream boards, the audience skews toward builders rather than buyers, and products far outside tech find little traction. Free, pleasant to use, and a natural week-two stop for anything developer-adjacent.
13. DevHunt
A launch board exclusively for developer tools, created by dev-tool makers who felt their products got lost among consumer apps on the general boards. It is open-source, free, and runs on a weekly cycle. The entire value proposition is audience purity: everyone browsing is a developer evaluating tools, so a hundred visitors here can be worth more than a thousand generalists — GitHub stars, real trials, and technical feedback included. The constraints are the obvious ones: total traffic is small, non-dev products are off-topic and will be ignored, and momentum depends on the volunteer energy behind it, which varies. If you are launching anything with an API, SDK, or CLI, it costs nothing and lands in front of precisely the right room.
14. Crunchbase
Not a discovery channel and not pretending to be one. Crunchbase is where journalists, investors, corp-dev teams, and — increasingly — AI systems building knowledge graphs go to confirm that a company exists, who founded it, and what it has raised. The free profile is the deliverable: name, description, founders, founding date, categories. Fill it once, accurately, and it quietly does entity work for you across the web, because countless databases and AI training sets syndicate Crunchbase data. The website link on the stored profile we read, captured 26 June 2025, carries rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer", and referral traffic is negligible, so there is nothing to optimise beyond accuracy. Paid tiers serve people researching companies, not companies seeking exposure — you almost certainly do not need one. Fifteen minutes at launch, then done.
15. F6S
A large, long-established startup network built around programs: accelerator applications, grants, competitions, and founder deals all run through F6S profiles, which is why millions of startups have one. For launch purposes the appeal is simple — the profile is free and the link is dofollow, making it one of the easy wins on the checklist. Beyond the link, expect little organic discovery: people come to F6S to apply to things and claim deals, not to browse for new tools. The profile pays for itself the first time you apply to an accelerator or claim a cloud-credits deal, since you will need it anyway. Create it once, keep the company data accurate, and collect the incidental benefits.
16. Launching Next
A long-running startup directory that publishes a steady stream of new-project listings and syndicates them to a subscriber base. The transaction is straightforward: a free submission gets you a permanent page with a dofollow link, usually within days, with no launch-day mechanics to orchestrate. Direct traffic per listing is modest — this is the checklist tier of the ecosystem, not a needle-mover — but the effort is fifteen minutes and the link is real, which is exactly the trade the checklist tier exists for. It pairs naturally with the other evergreen directories in a single submission session during week one or two. Write a proper description rather than pasting your tagline; syndicated listings with substance travel further than one-liners.
17. StartupBase
A smaller startup community where makers post products, gather upvotes and feedback, and keep a persistent profile page. The honest framing: this is the friendly-room tier. You will not get a traffic spike, and the audience is mostly other makers, but the barrier is zero, the feedback is genuine, and the listing persists. Communities at this scale reward participation visibly — someone who comments on others' launches gets meaningfully more attention on their own — so the return tracks the effort you put in rather than the audience you bring. Worth a listing in the same session as the other evergreen submissions, and worth actual participation if the community's stage matches yours. Also one of the sources that launch-directory roundups routinely cite, which gives listings incidental discoverability.
18. SideProjectors
A hybrid unlike the rest of the list: part showcase where makers show side projects, part marketplace where they sell them. That second half shapes the audience — browsers here include people shopping for projects to acquire, alongside makers looking at each other's work. For a launch, the showcase listing is free and low-effort, with modest traffic in the friendly-room tier. The distinctive value appears if you ever want an exit for a small project: listing it for sale here is one of the few free, low-stakes ways to test acquisition interest. Standard caution applies to any informal marketplace — vet buyers, use proper escrow for any real transaction, and treat inbound offers with the scepticism unverified marketplaces deserve.
19. Betabound
A community of people who sign up specifically to beta-test products, run by a company whose business is managed beta programs. Listing your beta is free and puts it in front of testers who opt in — people expecting rough edges and willing to file structured feedback, which is a different and more useful population than launch-day tourists. The scope is deliberately narrow: this is a pre-launch instrument only. There is no ranking, no launch spike, no SEO angle; once you are publicly available, the listing has done its work. Use it in the weeks before launch if you need testers beyond your own network, particularly for consumer products where testers with varied devices and habits matter. Expect quality over quantity.
20. Startup Buffer
A straightforward startup directory of the classic type: submit your product, get a permanent listing page with your description, link, and category. The free tier queues submissions for review; paid options expedite and add prominence. There is no community layer, no voting, and no launch event — the entire proposition is one more indexed page describing your product with a link, acquired in about ten minutes. Directories in this tier are best handled in batch: one session, accurate descriptions, done. Individually none of them moves a metric you will notice; collectively the checklist tier builds baseline web presence and a spread of citations that search engines and AI systems use to corroborate that your product exists and what it does. Set expectations exactly there.
21. PitchWall
A small daily launch board in the familiar format: submit, appear on the day's wall, collect upvotes and comments. Its position in the ecosystem is honest and useful — a low-stakes venue where the format can be practised before the launches that matter more. Competition per day is light, so a modest push places well, and the listing persists afterwards. The constraints are those of every small board: limited absolute traffic, an audience of fellow makers more than buyers, and rankings that reward whoever shows up with a few friends. Free to submit, with paid options for extra visibility. Reasonable as an early, low-pressure entry in a stacked sequence, or as extra coverage in the same week as the other smaller boards.
22. 10words
A directory-newsletter built on one constraint: every product is described in exactly ten words. Submissions are free, and accepted products go out in the daily email and onto the site. The audience is small compared to anything in the top half of this table, but it is a genuine, opted-in audience of people who enjoy discovering new products, and the format guarantees your pitch gets read in full — a property almost nothing else on this list can claim. The exercise of compressing your product into ten words is independently valuable; more than one founder has ended up using their ten-word version as the site tagline. Effort is minutes, cost is nothing, expectations should be a trickle of curious visitors rather than a spike.
23. Altern
Altern positions itself as a curated shortlist rather than an index of everything, and the submit page says so plainly: free to submit, no credit card, and every listing read by a person before it goes live. That gate cuts both ways. Rejection is a real outcome, and there is no published turnaround time, so plan for the listing to be a background task rather than part of a launch week. What you get if you pass is a permanent page with your logo, description and screenshots, plus inclusion in the alternatives and task pages that catch a lot of the long-tail search demand in this category. On the tool page we checked the outbound link was a direct anchor with no nofollow, ugc or sponsored value. Paid featured and leaderboard placements exist alongside the free tier, and they are kept visually separate from ordinary listings.
24. AI Tools Up
One of the few AI directories that writes its link policy into the free tier itself: the pricing table lists a do-follow backlink under the zero-cost option, and the listing page we checked matched, with a direct anchor carrying only noopener and noreferrer. The trade is patience. The free queue is quoted at up to thirty days, against twenty-four hours on the paid fast track. Two things to read carefully before you decide. The site self-reports around twenty thousand page views a month and eight thousand newsletter subscribers, and those numbers are not independently verified. The FAQ further down the same page contradicts the pricing table by saying a listing costs twenty dollars, so confirm the current terms in writing before you pay for anything. For a free submission the effort is a form and a wait, which is a fair price.
25. AINave
A small, tidy product directory whose pricing page is unusually direct about what the free tier includes: a public listing, a verified badge, and a do-follow backlink for zero, with a five dollar one-time upgrade that adds prominence and eligibility for a launch programme they describe as upcoming. The product page we checked carried a direct anchor with only noopener and noreferrer, and the same page used nofollow plus ugc on a third-party review link, which suggests the link attributes are set deliberately rather than by accident. Caveats worth weighing: the index is small, so expect little referral traffic on its own, and the five dollar tier makes the free and paid rows look similar enough that it is worth confirming which benefits actually differ. Treat it as a fifteen minute listing, not a launch channel.
26. AItoolMall
The submit page is a short form and a promise to reply within twenty-four hours, with an acceptance rule that amounts to anything legal gets published. That makes it one of the quickest free listings on this list, and the tool page we checked linked out with a plain anchor and no rel attribute at all, so the link is followed. The reason to think before submitting is the neighbourhood. The site runs a large adult and NSFW section across its footer and category navigation, on the same domain and templates as the general listings, and a monetised placement we sampled was nofollowed while an ordinary one was not. If your product is enterprise-facing or you care where your brand appears in a screenshot, weigh that. If you are optimising a checklist of free followed listings, it qualifies.
27. AI Tool List
An awesome-list rendered as a website. There is no submission form: you fork the awesome-ai-tool-list repository, add your entry to the right category in the README, and open a pull request. That is the whole process, and it is free. The upside of the model is transparency, since acceptance, rejection and the reason for either all happen in public on a diff you can read. The downside is that a maintainer has to merge, and no service level is promised anywhere. The rendered listings we checked linked straight to the tool with only noopener and noreferrer on the anchor, so the link is followed. The site is small and the design is minimal, so treat referral traffic as close to zero and value this as a clean, low-friction, permanently followed listing that costs you one pull request.
28. ToolPilot
Read the warning before the pitch. The submit page states that a link back to their site is now mandatory for all free listings, and that adding one of their badges is what qualifies you. A link required as a condition of getting a link is the textbook definition of a link scheme in Google's own spam policies, and the risk lands on your site as well as theirs. The technical facts, for completeness: the product page we checked linked out with no rel attribute at all, so the link is followed, and the destination carried an affiliate parameter without a sponsored value, which is a second guidelines problem on their side. Paid placements exist alongside the free tier. Our position is that a free listing is not worth putting a reciprocal badge in your footer for, and we would skip this one.
29. FutureTools
A well-known, genuinely free directory with a short form, a human reviewer, and a large associated YouTube and newsletter audience. It is worth submitting to. Just do not submit to it for SEO. Every tool page routes its visit button through an internal /go/ redirect rather than linking to your domain, and the site's own robots.txt contains a Disallow line for that exact path, so crawlers are told not to follow the hop at all. The anchor itself also carries noopener and noreferrer. That combination means the listing passes no link equity to you by any reading. What it can pass is attention, because the surrounding audience is real and the newsletter reaches people who install things. Submit here for reach and treat the SEO column as a zero, which is the honest way to value it.
30. AI Tools (aitools.inc)
The free tier is stated openly on the submit page: zero cost, a queue of thirty to ninety days, and no guaranteed placement, against a one hundred and twenty-nine dollar fast lane with a refund if the tool is declined. The index itself is large and sliced by category, job and task, which is the taxonomy that earns this category its search traffic. The link is the weak point. The visit button on a tool page points at an internal path ending in /go/website, which returns a 301 to your site with tracking parameters attached, and the anchor carries noopener. The redirect is not blocked in robots.txt, so this is softer than an outright nofollow, but it is still a tracker hop rather than a direct link and we score it accordingly. Free, slow, useful for discovery, weak for links.
31. AI Tools Board
A small board with an honest submit page: free to submit, five to seven business days to review, ninety-nine dollars if you want that compressed to twenty-four hours, and separate monthly slots at forty and fifty dollars for the two featured boxes at the top of the homepage and category pages. What the submit page does not say is that outbound links are nofollowed, and they are: every tool anchor we sampled, on both the homepage and a category page, carried rel="nofollow". No paid tier we could see changes that, so this is not a conditional case, it is a flat no. The board is small enough that referral traffic will be modest too. Submit it if you are working through a coverage checklist and it costs you five minutes, but do not count it as a link.
32. Official MCP Registry
The upstream source almost every other entry on this page copies from, backed by Anthropic, GitHub, Microsoft and PulseMCP. There is no web form. You publish your package to npm, PyPI, NuGet or Docker Hub, add an mcpName field to the manifest so ownership can be checked, run mcp-publisher init to generate a server.json, then authenticate with GitHub OAuth for an io.github.* namespace or a DNS TXT record for your own domain. Publishing is instant and free; the moderation policy says outright that consumers should assume minimal to no moderation, and only illegal content, malware, spam and broken servers get removed. Two honest limits: it is still labelled preview, and it serves JSON only, so there is no page for search engines and no backlink. Publish here first anyway, because the downstream directories ingest it.
33. GitHub MCP Registry
This is the catalogue VS Code actually opens: code.visualstudio.com/mcp redirects straight to github.com/mcp, so a listing here is the difference between being installable in two clicks inside Copilot and not being there at all. That reach comes with the tightest door on this page. It is curated rather than self-serve, and the documented route is to nominate your server by emailing [email protected]; GitHub has said self-publication is coming and that servers in the official registry will flow through automatically, which is the more realistic path for an independent maintainer. On SEO it gives you nothing: the listing renders your README the way GitHub renders any README, with rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" on every outbound link, and the only dofollow links point back at github.com. Come here for installs, not for links.
34. Docker MCP Catalog
The best documented submission process here and one of only two catalogues with a client integration confirmed in vendor docs rather than marketing copy: Docker Desktop's MCP Toolkit browses this catalogue in-app and writes the config into Claude Desktop and VS Code for the user. You fork docker/mcp-registry, run task wizard (or task remote-wizard for a hosted server), and open a PR adding servers/<name>/server.yaml. Docker will build, sign and host the image for you at no cost. The bars are real: a permissive licence, with the contributing guide saying MIT or Apache 2 are great and GPL is not, a Docker team review on every PR, and test credentials shared through a separate form. The guide states an entry goes live within 24 hours of approval. We read a live catalogue page and the server's own documentation link carried only rel="noopener noreferrer", so it passes equity.
Visit: github.com/docker/mcp-registry/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
35. Glama MCP directory
The largest index by volume, listing more than eighty thousand servers, and the one you are most likely to already be in without knowing: it crawls public GitHub repositories rather than waiting for a submission. Maintainers claim a listing by signing in with GitHub, or by adding a glama.json file to an organisation repo, and remote servers can verify through a well-known file on their own domain. Every server gets an automated tool-quality score and a sandboxed check for risky behaviour, so there is no human review queue and no wait. The link picture is split and worth knowing before you count on it: on a live listing page the canonical repository link carried no rel attribute at all, while every link rendered out of your README, including your own homepage, carried rel="ugc nofollow". No confirmed client reads it natively; treat it as a human discovery surface.
36. Cursor Marketplace
Cursor's first-party plugin store, and the only Cursor surface the editor itself reads. Submissions go through cursor.com/marketplace/publish and Cursor's help documentation states that every plugin is manually reviewed before it is listed, so expect a wait and expect to be judged on whether the thing works. It is free. The important distinction for anyone searching: cursor.directory is a separate community site run by an independent maintainer, has no confirmed integration with the editor, and was behind a bot challenge when we tried to verify it, so it sits in the appendix rather than here. On a live marketplace listing we found both the publisher's own website and its GitHub repository linked with rel="noopener noreferrer" only, which makes this one of the few client-owned catalogues that also passes link equity.
37. Claude Connectors Directory
The directory that reaches Claude on the web, on desktop, on mobile and in Claude Code, which makes it the highest-value placement here for a hosted server and also the hardest to get. Submission is open in principle but gated in practice: remote servers are submitted from an admin settings page that requires a Team or Enterprise organisation, so an individual on a Pro plan cannot file one, and desktop extensions use a separate form. The requirements are specific rather than vague, covering OAuth 2.0 for anything authenticated, title and readOnlyHint and destructiveHint annotations on your tools, and a published privacy policy whose absence is called out as an immediate rejection. Listings are split into reviewed and lighter-screened tiers. There is no public web page per connector, so there is no backlink to gain.
38. LobeHub MCP Marketplace
The marketplace behind LobeChat, and one of the few directories where the connection between the public site and the product is verifiable rather than claimed: the client's install flow calls the same backend that serves the public pages. You publish with a GitHub-authenticated CLI that proves you own the repository, or through the submit button on the site. There is no human review gate, and metadata is enriched afterwards rather than before. It was the cleanest link result we measured on this page. A live listing carried no rel attribute at all on any outbound link, so the repository, the npm packages and the server's own homepage were all dofollow. Weigh that against reach: the audience is LobeChat users and readers of a Chinese and English bilingual site, which is narrower than the Docker or GitHub catalogues.
39. Cline MCP Marketplace
Cline's in-editor marketplace, where a listing means a user can install your server in one click and let the agent handle cloning and configuration. The submission path moved: the current repository takes a pull request adding registry/mcps/<slug>/entry.json against a published JSON schema, validated by npm run validate before you open it. The older cline/mcp-marketplace repository still tells people to file a GitHub issue, and that queue now holds more than two thousand open submissions with no commits to the repository since mid-2025, though maintainers were still closing individual submissions this week. Read that as a real backlog, not a dead project, and use the newer PR route. Being GitHub-hosted, the listing itself is worth nothing for links: external README links render with rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow".
40. Gemini CLI Extensions gallery
The lowest-effort listing on this page. Google's own documentation states that the gallery automatically indexes public extensions and that you do not need to file an issue or email anyone: put the extension in a public GitHub repository, add the gemini-cli-extension topic to the repository's About section, and the crawler finds it. An extension bundles MCP servers with context files and custom commands, so a plain server needs a thin wrapper. The gallery page itself is server-rendered and we counted well over a thousand outbound GitHub links with no rel attribute at all, which makes it a genuine dofollow surface, although there is no per-extension page to rank. One caveat you should act on: the site currently carries a banner about Gemini CLI being replaced by Antigravity CLI for some tiers, so verify the destination before you invest.
41. mcpservers.org
A large SEO-driven directory with a web form and no GitHub requirement, claiming over two hundred thousand monthly visitors on its own advertising page. It is on this list because it is explicit about a trade most directories keep quiet. The free listing exists, and every outbound link we checked on a live free listing carried rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer", the repository link included. The 39 dollar one-time Premium Submit is described on the submit page as buying faster review approval, an official badge and a dofollow link, which is the same price and the same offer another large MCP directory sells. Above that sit sponsorships from 500 to 2,500 dollars a month. No AI client is known to read it and the operator is not named anywhere on the site. Submit free for the traffic; only pay if you are buying the link knowingly.
42. mcp.so
One of the earliest and most linked-to MCP directories, and still one of the biggest by listing count. Submission is a web form that expects a public GitHub repository, with a free review queue and a 39 dollar one-time paid tier whose bullet points promise immediate publication, a verified badge, featured placement and a dofollow project link. The free tier is definitively not that: on a live server page every external link, the repository included, carried rel="nofollow ugc noopener noreferrer". We did not pay, so the paid claim is unverified. We also found no evidence that any AI client reads the site, and the public GitHub project behind it has not been pushed to since 2025 even though the listings themselves are actively updated. Submit free for the coverage and judge the upsell on its own terms.
43. Awesome MCP Servers (punkpeye)
The most starred MCP list on GitHub by a wide margin, at more than ninety thousand stars, and still merging pull requests this month. Getting in costs one fork, one alphabetical line in the README and one PR, which is the lowest bar of anything here that involves a human. Two things are worth knowing before you treat it as independent. Its declared repository homepage is the Glama directory, so the list and that index share an owner, and a listing here is effectively part of the same surface. And because it lives on GitHub, the rendered README gives you nothing for SEO: we confirmed on the live page that external links carry rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow". The value is developer eyeballs and the chance of being copied into someone else's tutorial, not link equity.
44. TrustRadius
The third name in B2B software reviews, smaller than the two that dominate the category and, on the evidence, the only one of the three that actually links out. On an archived copy of a live vendor profile, captured 27 May 2026, the vendor link carries rel="noopener noreferrer" with no nofollow, and the pricing link next to it has no rel attribute at all. Reviews here run long and are verified against the reviewer's employment, which is why enterprise buyers read them late in an evaluation rather than early. The free vendor listing is the whole entry point: claim it, fill in the categories, and let customers write. Paid programs exist for lead data and placement, and they are priced for companies with a sales team. Do not treat this as a launch venue. It pays off once you have customers whose reviews will survive scrutiny.
45. StackShare
A database of what companies actually run, organised around stacks rather than categories. Each tool gets a page listing the companies using it, the tools it is compared against, and a link out to the product. On an archived copy of a live tool page, captured 20 January 2026, that link carries rel="noopener noreferrer" and a referral parameter, with no nofollow, which makes it one of the few free dofollow links available from a site of this size. What you will not get is a launch spike: nobody browses StackShare for new releases, and the traffic that arrives is engineers checking what a company uses before adopting something themselves. The listing compounds slowly if your tool genuinely turns up in real stacks, and does very little if it does not. Free, worth twenty minutes, then leave it alone.
46. GoodFirms
A review and listing site that ranks software and service providers inside category pages, and one that appears on most directory checklists specifically for its backlink. That reason does not hold up. On an archived copy of a live listing page, captured 8 August 2025, the Visit website link carries rel="nofollow", so the free listing passes no link value at all. What it does offer is a category page that ranks for buyer queries in some verticals, particularly services and agency work, where the ranked list is the page people came to read. Listings are free to create, with paid options for position and badges, and the free entry sits below the paid ones in competitive categories exactly as it does on the larger review sites. Worth an entry if your category is well populated there. Not worth paying for on the strength of a link that is not there.
Common questions
Which startup directories are actually free?
Toolfound (first 100 launches), Product Hunt, Hacker News, Uneed's free queue, Reddit communities, Indie Hackers, SaaSHub, AlternativeTo, F6S, Crunchbase, Launching Next, StartupBase and the rest of the table's checklist tier all have genuinely free listing paths.
Are free directory submissions worth the time?
In batch, yes: one session covering the free evergreen tier builds permanent pages, a spread of citations, and a handful of real dofollow links. Individually, no single checklist-tier directory will move a metric — budget an afternoon total, not a campaign.
What is the catch with free listings?
Usually queue time or prominence: free tiers wait longer or sit below paid placements. The other catch to watch for is directories that condition the listing or its dofollow status on a link back — that is a link scheme, and worth walking away from.
Ready to launch? Book a date on Toolfound — you will see your queue position and launch date before committing to anything. More segment guides: The 17 Best Launch Platforms for B2B SaaS, Compared · The 10 Best Launch Platforms and Directories for AI Tools · The 10 Best Launch Platforms for Developer Tools · The 18 Best Places to Post a Side Project, Compared · Startup Directories That Give Dofollow Backlinks, Verified · The 15 Best Product Hunt Alternatives, Honestly Compared · AI Tool Directories, Compared: Which Ones Are Free, and Which Ones Link Dofollow · Where to List Your MCP Server: Every Registry and Directory, Compared · High Authority Startup Directories: Which Big Names Actually Link to You