Free developer tool directories, in short
Free almost never means free of conditions. Expect to be asked for a badge in your footer, a link back from your site, or a longer wait than the paying submissions. Read the submission page before you start typing.
Free directory submission sites, defined
A free directory submission site accepts your listing without payment. That is the whole definition, and it hides a lot: free almost always carries a condition. The three most common are a badge or return link on your own site, a review queue that paid submissions skip, and a nofollow link where paying would make it dofollow.
None of those conditions are unreasonable. Directories cost money to run and moderate, and asking for a link back is a fair trade for a page that sends you visitors. The mistake is discovering the condition after you have written the listing rather than before.
By the numbers
These 12 directories have a median rating of DR 68. The strongest is DEV Community at DR 91, the weakest at DR 10. 5 pass a dofollow link.
That is 10 points above the median for the full list of 175 directories, which sits at DR 58. By band that is 3 rated 80 or above, 4 rated 60 to 79, 3 rated 40 to 59 and 2 rated below 40. 1 of them have no traffic estimate at all, which usually means too little to measure rather than none.
What a listing actually gets you
A listing here converts at rates the general directories cannot approach, because everyone reading it is already looking for what you built. Ten visitors from a developer directory will often outperform a thousand from a launch platform on any metric you care about after the first week.
There is a second effect worth knowing about. Developer directories are heavily represented in the training and retrieval data behind coding assistants, so a listing increasingly determines whether your tool gets suggested when someone asks an AI how to solve the problem you solve.
Submitting without wasting the evening
Link the documentation, not the marketing page. Developers arriving from these sites want to see the install command, the API surface and the licence before they will consider anything else. An honest limitations section converts better here than a feature list, because the audience will find the limitations anyway. If your tool is open source, say so prominently: it is the single strongest signal on most of these sites.
Common mistakes
Agreeing to a badge requirement and then never adding the badge, which gets the listing quietly removed a month later. Submitting to every free directory in one sitting because they are free, which is the exact pattern that makes a link profile look manufactured. And skipping the categories field, which is what decides whether anyone ever sees the entry.
Where to start
By audience size, the biggest here are Hacker News, DEV Community and Product Hunt, led by 13.53M visits a month. Only SideProjectors is quick to approve, so start there if you are launching this week.
Questions people ask
How many are there, and what do they cost?
12 directories match on this page. 12 take a submission for nothing, 0 run a free tier with paid upgrades, and 0 charge for every listing.
Which should I submit to first?
By rating, DEV Community (DR 91), Hacker News (DR 91) and Product Hunt (DR 91). By audience, Hacker News is the largest at 13.53M visits a month. Relevance beats both: a directory that actually covers what you built will do more than a stronger one that does not.
Where can I submit my website for free?
The table above lists every free option we track, sorted so you can start with the strongest. The free tier on the larger launch platforms is usually worth more than any number of small free-only directories.
Are online directories free?
Many are, and many more run a free tier alongside paid upgrades. What you usually give up on the free path is speed and placement, not the listing itself.
Is a free listing worth less than a paid one?
Not inherently. Several of the highest-rated sites here take free submissions. Paying typically buys position and a faster queue rather than a fundamentally better link.
Why do developer directories send so little traffic?
Because developers do not browse directories, they search for a specific problem and land on one page. The visit counts are low and the conversion rates are not comparable to anything else on this list.
Does open source help?
Considerably. Several of these directories either prioritise open-source entries or have a dedicated section for them, and the audience treats a public repository as evidence that the tool is real.
Should I submit a library or just the product?
Both, if they are genuinely separate. A library and the hosted service built on it are two different things to two different readers, and most directories are happy to list them separately.
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.