Startup and developer tool directories, in short
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 15 directories have a median rating of DR 63. The strongest is DEV Community at DR 91, the weakest at DR 12. 5 of them accept a submission for nothing, and 2 charge for every listing. 10 pass a dofollow link.
That is 5 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, 5 rated 60 to 79, 4 rated 40 to 59 and 3 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
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
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 OpenHunts, led by 13.53M visits a month. The highest-rated one you can use without paying is DEV Community at DR 91. 5 approve quickly, Twelve Tools, Dofollow Tools and Forg among them.
Questions people ask
How many are there, and what do they cost?
15 directories match on this page. 5 take a submission for nothing, 8 run a free tier with paid upgrades, and 1 charge for every listing.
Which should I submit to first?
By rating, DEV Community (DR 91), Hacker News (DR 91) and Twelve Tools (DR 82). 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.
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.