Where to Submit Your App for Free: The Short List

Every page ranking for this promises a bigger number than the last one. Fifty directories. A hundred. A thousand and seventeen. I went through the top results and the problem isn't the length — it's that nobody opens the links. Sites that went paid two years ago are still filed under "free". Two of the names that appear on almost every list don't resolve at all any more.

There are about ten free places worth an indie app maker's afternoon, not a hundred. On 2026-08-14 I opened every one below and read its own submission page: Product Hunt, Show HN, itch.io, SaaSHub, Tiny Startups and TryMy.app take submissions with no payment involved; Uneed, AlternativeTo, Fazier and Launching Next are free to submit with a paid option to skip the queue. BetaList — on nearly every "free directories" list in the search results — now states plainly that there is no free submission option. Terms drift, so check before you spend an hour.

Below: why these lists keep inflating, the test that separates a directory with readers from a link farm, the full table with what each free tier really buys, the ones I dropped and why, and an honest account of what a free listing does and doesn't do. I run one of the directories on this list and I'll flag it every time it comes up.

Why do free directory lists keep getting longer?

Because the number is the product. A page titled "100+ startup directories" gets clicked more than one titled "ten that work", and the list itself is usually a lead magnet for something else — a $99 or $169 done-for-you submission service, an email-gated spreadsheet, or the publisher's own launch platform sitting at position one.

Once length is the selling point, two things follow automatically. Nothing ever gets removed, because removing entries makes the number go down. And nothing gets checked, because checking a thousand links is a week of work that makes the number go down.

The other habit worth naming is ranking by domain authority or domain rating. Almost every page in these results sorts its list by a third-party link-strength score. That score is a guess about a site's backlink profile. It tells you nothing about whether a human reads the site, whether anyone still moderates it, or whether the submission form still works. A parked domain with a decade of old links can outscore an active showcase with real browsers on it.

And chasing directory links specifically is the thing search engines already name. Google's spam policies list "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as an example of link spam. Submitting to a hundred sites nobody reads, to collect a hundred links, is the exact pattern that page describes — so the volume play isn't just a waste of an afternoon, it's aimed at a target that's been marked for years.

What separates a directory with readers from a link farm?

Four checks, each about thirty seconds, and you can run them on any site before you fill in a form.

Is there a date on the most recent entry? Open the homepage and find the newest listing. If it's a fortnight old on a site that claims daily launches, the queue has stopped moving. If there's no date anywhere, that's its own answer.

Does a human appear anywhere? Look for a named editor, a review policy, a "why we rejected this" page, or a submission that visibly got turned down. Auto-approve sites accept everything, which is why nobody browses them.

Do the outbound links work? Click three listings at random and see where they land. A directory full of dead product links has been collecting submissions and doing nothing with them for a long time.

Is the free tier the real tier, or the bait tier? This is the one that catches people. A site can be free to submit and functionally paid to be seen — free entries buried below a wall of sponsored slots, or a free queue measured in months against a paid queue measured in days. Neither is dishonest, but you should know which one you're joining before you spend twenty minutes on the form.

None of that requires a tool. It requires opening the site, which is the step the hundred-item lists skip.

Which free platforms are worth the hour?

Everything in this table was opened on 2026-08-14 and every claim about cost comes from that site's own submission, pricing or FAQ page on that date — not from memory and not from another list. Expect terms to drift; three of these changed their pricing structure at some point between the competing articles being written and today.

Platform	Who actually reads it	What "free" really means there	Review wait	What a good outcome looks like
Product Hunt	Early adopters, tech press, other founders	Free. Its launch guide states it's 100% free to use	You schedule your own launch date	One concentrated day of traffic, plus a page that stays up
Show HN	Developers, technical readers	Free, no account fee, no queue	Instant — you post it yourself	Comments that tell you what's actually wrong with it
itch.io	Game players, creative-tool users	Free — a page needs only a free account	Instant, self-publish	A permanent store page you control, with downloads
SaaSHub	People comparing software alternatives	Free to list; a featured slot is a separate $99/month product	Not stated on the submission page	Showing up on the "alternatives to X" page for your competitor
Tiny Startups	Indie founders, weekly leaderboard watchers	Free to launch, with a paid "DR Boost" upsell afterwards	Not stated	A week on the leaderboard and a listing that stays
TryMy.app — ours	Indie makers and people who browse to try things	Free, and free is the default — no trial, no expiry	A few days; a person opens the app first	A permanent listing written by someone who used it
Uneed	Makers and tool hunters	Free "join the line" gets the next available slot; $14.99 fast-tracks it, $29.99 picks your date	However long the free line is	A scheduled launch day without paying for it
AlternativeTo	Large general software-shopping audience	Free to suggest; a one-time $5 jumps the queue	Free queue: at least a few months. Paid: 1–2 business days	Turning up when someone searches for an alternative to a big incumbent
Fazier	Indie makers, launch watchers	Free tier is listed within 30 days but requires a link back to Fazier on your homepage or footer; paid tiers drop that requirement	Up to 30 days on free	A listing plus a badge, if you're happy to link back
Launching Next	Startup-watchers, newsletter readers	Free to submit; a $99 upgrade buys consideration within one business day	Reviewed daily, no guaranteed date on free	A write-up you didn't pay for

Two columns deserve a second read.

"What free really means" is where the competing lists collapse everything into one word. Fazier's free tier is genuinely free of money and costs you a backlink from your own site instead — that's a fair trade, but it's a trade, and you should decide about it deliberately rather than discover it at the end of a form. AlternativeTo's free queue and its $5 queue are the same review standard applied at wildly different speeds; if your app is time-sensitive, five dollars is the honest answer and I'd rather say so than pretend the free path is equivalent.

"Review wait" is mostly blank on purpose. Several of these sites don't publish a number, and I'm not going to invent one. Where a site states a wait, it's in the table verbatim. Where it doesn't, the cell says so.

What did I check and drop?

This is the section the long lists don't have, and it's the reason this one is short. Every name below appears on at least one page currently ranking for these keywords.

Went paid. BetaList is the significant one. Its FAQ now states that all submissions are paid and there is no free submission option. It's still described as a free directory — sometimes with a specific free-queue-versus-expedited comparison — on multiple pages ranking today. If you budgeted an hour for free submissions and BetaList was on your list, that hour just changed shape.

Stopped resolving. Launched.io and ErliBird returned no DNS resolution at all when I checked. Feed My App and Toolhunt returned a 522 (the domain answers, the server behind it doesn't). Those four are still listed, with straight faces and occasionally with prices attached, on pages published in 2026.

Changed identity. BetaPage now 301-redirects to Pitchwall, which is alive and posting — its newest entry was under a day old when I looked — but I couldn't find its submission terms stated anywhere I could read, so I'm not putting it in the table as free.

Couldn't verify, so left out. MicroLaunch advertises a $39 Pro Launch with skip-the-queue included, and I could not find a clear statement of what a free launch gets, so I'm not claiming it has one. DevHunt, StartupBase, OpenAlternative, Peerlist and Startup Stash all sit behind login walls or render only in JavaScript, and I couldn't read their current submission terms without an account. They may well be fine. I just can't tell you they are, and a maybe in a table reads exactly like a fact.

That's five confirmed-dead-or-paid and six unverifiable, out of a candidate list barely twice the length of the final one. Now apply that ratio to a list of a hundred entries nobody has opened since 2024.

How many should you submit to in launch week?

Fewer than you think, and not all in one week.

The realistic shape: pick three or four from the table that match your app, do those properly, and stop. "Properly" means a tagline written for that site's grid, a description that fits its length limit, and screenshots that survive its card size — not the same paragraph pasted ten times. The submission asset pack covers exactly what to have in hand so that four listings take an hour rather than an afternoon, and how to write an app tagline covers the one field every single form on this list asks for.

It's worth looking at a real grid before you write any of it. Open the showcase, or any of the platforms above, and notice how little of your text actually renders on a card: an icon, a name, one line, a category. That's the surface you're writing for, and it's smaller than the form implies.

The argument for stopping at three or four isn't purity, it's arithmetic. Sites with real readers are the minority. Once you've done those, each additional submission is going to a smaller and less-read place, while costing the same twenty minutes. The tenth listing is not a tenth of the value of the first — it's a rounding error with a form attached.

There's also a copy problem at volume. If you're submitting to twenty sites, you will paste identical text everywhere, and identical text is what auto-approve link farms are full of. The listings that actually get browsed are the ones written for the specific grid they sit in, which is a thing you can do four times in an hour and cannot do twenty times in an afternoon.

What order should you submit in?

Sequence matters more than count, because the slow ones need a head start.

Weeks before launch: the ones with queues. AlternativeTo's free queue runs to months by its own account, and Fazier's free tier is up to thirty days. If you want those live for launch day, they have to go in now. This is also when you write the asset pack once and reuse it.

Weeks before launch: the permanent pages. SaaSHub, itch.io if you're a game or creative tool, and a human-reviewed showcase. These aren't events. They're pages that need to exist and be crawled before your launch traffic arrives, so they're the before work.

Launch day: the timed ones. Product Hunt and Uneed are scheduled slots — they're the day itself. Show HN is the same day if the product genuinely qualifies, and its guidelines are strict about that: it's for something people can play with, and blog posts, sign-up pages and newsletters are explicitly out. A landing page posted as a Show HN gets removed, and you only get to do it once.

The week after: the leftovers. Whatever you didn't get to, plus anything you learned belongs on your list because that's where the people who liked it came from.

If you want the wider picture of how directories sit alongside launch platforms, communities and your own writing, where to post your app in 2026 sorts the whole landscape by half-life — which is the column that actually changes strategy.

What should you expect from a free listing, honestly?

A trickle and a page. That's the accurate answer, and I'm giving it as someone who would benefit from a more exciting one.

A free directory listing is not a traffic event. It's a page that exists indefinitely, describing what your app does, linking to it, findable by search, and browsed occasionally by the specific kind of person who reads directories because they enjoy trying new things. That person is rare and disproportionately useful — they actually click, they actually sign up, and they occasionally tell other people. But there aren't many of them per site per week.

What that means practically: don't judge a listing on launch week. Judge it on whether, three months later, anything at all arrived from it. Most won't. One or two will keep dripping for years, and you can only find out which by doing the four and waiting.

What a listing definitely won't do is fix a product nobody wants, or rescue a landing page that doesn't explain itself. If your app has been in front of people and they bounced, another listing is not the missing piece — why nobody tries your app is the more useful read, and the fix is upstream of any directory.

I should also be plain about the thing I'm selling. TryMy.app is one of the ten in that table, and it's in the middle of it rather than the top because Product Hunt and AlternativeTo will put you in front of more people than we will — that's simply true, and a page that pretended otherwise would be worth less to you than the directory listing itself. What we offer is a specific thing: a free listing that is genuinely free with no expiry, reviewed by a person who opens the app before writing the entry, on a grid where every app is free to try in some form. There's a paid featured spot too. It's a position and a badge, not a traffic guarantee, and the free listing is the default rather than the trial.

If your problem is that you don't have anyone to test the thing before you submit it anywhere, that's a different problem with a different fix. Favors.dev is built around builders trading favours — "test my app" for "test mine" — which gets you the three real users whose confusion tells you what to fix before a reviewer hits the same wall.

FAQ

How many directories should I submit my app to?

Three or four, done well, from a list you've checked yourself. The value drops steeply after the sites with actual readers, and the twentieth submission takes the same twenty minutes as the first while reaching a smaller audience. The bigger risk at volume is that you start pasting identical copy everywhere, which is what makes a listing look like link-farm filler rather than something a person wrote.

Are free app directories worth it?

Worth an afternoon once, yes — worth building a strategy around, no. The honest framing is that a listing is a slow asset rather than a traffic event: a permanent page, a link, and an occasional visitor who browses directories on purpose. Judge them at three months, not at three days. And be sceptical of any page selling directory submissions on the strength of link-building — Google's spam policies name low-quality directory links as an example of link spam, so volume for its own sake is aimed at something that's already been discounted.

Do directories want a live product or is a landing page enough?

Almost all of them want something a stranger can actually use. Show HN's guidelines say so explicitly — sign-up pages and reading material can't be tried out, so they don't qualify. AlternativeTo lists coming-soon, closed-beta and invite-only apps among the things it declines. Our own bar is the same: real, working, and free to try in some form, whether that's fully free, a trial, or freemium. A beta is fine nearly everywhere. A waitlist page with nothing behind it is not.

How long do submissions take to get approved?

It varies more than any other part of this, which is why the table has a column for it and several blanks. AlternativeTo states at least a few months for free submissions against 1–2 business days for the $5 priority route. Fazier's free tier says listed within 30 days. Launching Next reviews daily but only guarantees a one-business-day look on the $99 upgrade. Ours takes a few days, because a person opens the app before writing the entry. Anything approved instantly wasn't reviewed, which tells you something about who's browsing it.

Sources

Every link in the table above was fetched on 2026-08-14 and every cost claim comes from that platform's own submission, pricing or FAQ page on that date. The following were used for the non-directory claims:

• Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search — link spam definitions, including low-quality directory and bookmark site links
• Hacker News, Show HN guidelines — what qualifies as a Show HN and what is explicitly off-topic
• BetaList, FAQ — the statement that all submissions are paid with no free option
• AlternativeTo, FAQ — free versus $5 priority review timelines and the categories it declines
• Product Hunt, Launch guide — that launching is free to use

Disclosure: TryMy.app is one of the directories listed in this article. It's listed in the middle of the table, not the top, and the paid featured spot is described as what it is.