Free directory submission sites: what you get
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 36 directories have a median rating of DR 64. The strongest is SourceForge at DR 93, the weakest at DR 10. 13 pass a dofollow link.
That is 6 points above the median for the full list of 175 directories, which sits at DR 58. By band that is 11 rated 80 or above, 8 rated 60 to 79, 9 rated 40 to 59 and 8 rated below 40. 4 of them have no traffic estimate at all, which usually means too little to measure rather than none.
What a listing actually gets you
The free tier is how you find out whether a directory is worth anything to you. Submit, wait, and look at what arrives over the next month. If the answer is nothing, you have lost an hour rather than a fee, and you now know not to pay for placement on that site.
Several of the highest-rated sites on the entire list take free submissions, which is worth repeating because the assumption that paid means better does not survive contact with the data. Price and quality are close to uncorrelated here.
Submitting without wasting the evening
Read the submission page before you type anything, and look specifically for the badge requirement, the queue policy and the link type. Then batch the work: write the name, one-liner, long description, category and logo once, keep them in a file, and paste them into each form. Most of the time people spend on free submissions goes on rewriting the same sentence forty ways, and the rewriting makes the listings worse rather than better.
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 SourceForge, Hacker News and DEV Community, led by 18M visits a month. 6 approve quickly, Indie Hackers, AlternativeTo and Dodo Payments Index among them.
Questions people ask
How many are there, and what do they cost?
36 directories match on this page. 36 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, SourceForge (DR 93), DEV Community (DR 91) and Hacker News (DR 91). By audience, SourceForge is the largest at 18M 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.
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.