How to choose startup directories
The general startup directories have the largest audiences and the shortest attention spans. A listing here is worth most on the day it goes live, so line them up around a launch rather than drip-feeding them over months.
What counts as a startup directory
Startup directories index companies rather than products: what you are building, who is building it, roughly how far along you are. Some are launch platforms where everything is ordered by date and votes, others are permanent indexes where your entry sits until you update it. The two behave completely differently and reward completely different tactics.
On the launch platforms, the day is everything. On the permanent indexes, the day does not matter at all and the category page does. Working out which kind you are submitting to takes thirty seconds and changes how you should spend the effort.
By the numbers
These 75 directories have a median rating of DR 53. The strongest is DEV Community at DR 91, the weakest at DR 12. 16 of them accept a submission for nothing, and 13 charge for every listing. 49 pass a dofollow link.
That is 5 points below the median for the full list of 175 directories, which sits at DR 58. By band that is 8 rated 80 or above, 24 rated 60 to 79, 28 rated 40 to 59 and 15 rated below 40. 24 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 launch platforms give you a spike: traffic, sign-ups, sometimes press, almost all of it inside forty-eight hours. The permanent indexes give you the opposite, a slow trickle that continues for years and a page that ranks for your company name alongside your own site.
Both give you something less obvious, which is a dated, third-party record that your company existed and did a thing on a particular date. That turns out to matter when journalists, investors and search engines try to work out whether you are real.
Submitting without wasting the evening
These reward timing more than polish. Pick a launch date, submit to as many as you can in the two days before it, and keep the description identical everywhere so the mentions reinforce each other. A listing that goes live three weeks after your launch is worth a fraction of one that goes live on the day. Have your founder profile, a logo, a one-liner and a 300-character description in a file before you start, because you will be pasting them fifteen times.
Common mistakes
Spreading submissions over a month, so you are never more than mildly visible on any single day. Submitting to the big platforms without warming anyone up first, then wondering why the launch died at rank forty. And treating a permanent index like a launch platform by submitting the day before you have anything to show, which gets you a dead entry you cannot easily update.
Where to start
By audience size, the biggest here are Hacker News, DEV Community and F6S, led by 13.53M visits a month. The highest-rated one you can use without paying is DEV Community at DR 91. 17 approve quickly, Startup Fame, Twelve Tools and Indie Hackers among them.
Questions people ask
How many are there, and what do they cost?
75 directories match on this page. 16 take a submission for nothing, 46 run a free tier with paid upgrades, and 8 charge for every listing.
Which should I submit to first?
By rating, DEV Community (DR 91), Hacker News (DR 91) and Startup Fame (DR 84). 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.
What are the best startup directories?
By reach, Product Hunt, Hacker News and Indie Hackers are still the three that matter most, and all three are free. By durability, the permanent indexes such as F6S, BetaList and Startup Stash keep sending small amounts of traffic for years. The table above lets you sort by either.
Should I submit to all of them at once?
To the launch platforms, yes, within the same week. To the permanent indexes it makes no difference, so those can be worked through whenever you have a spare evening.
Do startup directories help with funding?
Indirectly. Investors do not browse them, but they do search for you, and a directory entry with a coherent description is one more page saying the same clear thing about what you do.
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.