Where to list your software

How this list works

Directory submission sites repay the evening they cost only when they match what you built. The table above is ordered so you can judge that quickly: rating for what a link is worth, traffic for whether anyone will see it, price for what it costs, and the link column for whether search engines follow it at all.

What a directory listing is for

A directory listing is a page about your product that you did not have to build, on a domain that already has an audience and, usually, rankings. That is the whole mechanism. It puts you in front of people looking for what you made, it creates a page that can rank for your product name and its variations, and it leaves a citation behind in the places that other sites and language models read when they assemble software shortlists.

What it does not do is move your rankings on its own. A single directory link is a rounding error whatever its domain rating. The value accumulates across a dozen relevant listings over months, alongside everything else you are doing, and anyone promising otherwise is selling submissions rather than results.

By the numbers

These 175 directories have a median rating of DR 58. The strongest is SourceForge at DR 93, the weakest at DR 10. 36 of them accept a submission for nothing, and 37 charge for every listing. 106 pass a dofollow link.

By band that is 18 rated 80 or above, 66 rated 60 to 79, 59 rated 40 to 59 and 32 rated below 40. 67 of them have no traffic estimate at all, which usually means too little to measure rather than none.

How to read the columns

Domain rating estimates how strong a site's backlink profile is, on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100. It is the first thing everyone sorts by and the least useful in isolation, because it says nothing about whether anyone visits. Traffic is the estimated monthly visits, and where it is missing the honest reading is "too little to measure" rather than "none". Price separates free, freemium and paid, and the link column tells you whether the listing passes ranking signals or only visitors.

Read them together. A directory rated 50 with 100,000 visits a month in your exact category will do more for you than one rated 85 with no measurable audience, every time. Relevance beats both numbers, which is why the focus filter exists.

Working through the list

Start with the slow, high-authority sites, because the queue is the part you cannot shorten. Submit to those weeks before you need anything, then work down by rating while you wait. Save the fast-approval directories for the two days before a launch date, where their speed is the entire point.

Write the listing once. Name, one-line summary, a longer paragraph, a category, a square logo and one screenshot of the product doing its job. Keep them in a file and paste them into each form. Most of the time people spend on directory submissions goes on rewriting the same sentence forty different ways, and the rewriting makes the listings worse rather than better.

Where to start

By audience size, the biggest here are SourceForge, Hacker News and DEV Community, led by 18M visits a month. The highest-rated one you can use without paying is SourceForge at DR 93. 31 approve quickly, Startup Fame, Twelve Tools and Indie Hackers among them.

Questions people ask

Every figure quoted above is read off the table on this page, so it moves as the list does. Domain rating and traffic are third-party estimates captured in September 2026: useful for ordering a shortlist, not precise figures.