GuideFounders12 min read

State of AI directories, October 2026: 110 places, by the numbers

110 AI directories and launch sites checked on October 10, 2026: who still lists for free, what a badge buys, median prices, queues, links and closures.

EffectHub ResearchOctober 11, 2026

On this page11 sections

Free is the exception at AI directories
The badge economy
What a paid listing costs
The queue is the product
What the link says
Authority is not audience
What the search traffic is made of
Where directories go when they die
Methodology
Cite this
Sources

On October 10, 2026 we read the submission pages of 110 places where founders list an AI tool: 61 AI tool directories and 49 launch platforms, startup directories, review sites and communities. For each one we wrote down the free route and its conditions, every published price, the quoted review time, the link a live listing carries and whether the site still works. This is what the whole set says when you count it.

13 of the 110 are dead or closed to new submissions: about one in eight.
66 of the 97 live places have a free way in, but only 28 of the 53 live AI directories do.
20 of those 66 free routes ask for a badge or a link back in some form; 11 make it the condition.
The median one-time price to get listed is $49 at AI directories and $24 at launch platforms and startup directories.
28 of the 53 live AI directories are not in the Tranco top million sites.

This report is about the market as a whole. Whether a listing pays off is in Are AI directories worth it?, and what the link tags mean is in Do AI directory backlinks help SEO?.

Free is the exception at AI directories

Launch platforms, startup directories, review sites and communities still mostly let you in for nothing: 38 of the 44 live ones describe a free route. AI tool directories are different. Only 28 of the 53 live ones do, 19 sell listings only, and for six we could not tell from the outside.

Live places with a free way in, October 10, 2026

AI tool directories, 28 of 5353%
Launch platforms, startup directories, review sites and communities, 38 of 4486%

The better-known an AI directory is, the narrower the free door. Seven sit in the Tranco top 200,000. Four of them, Futurepedia, Toolify, TopAI.tools and OpenTools, have no free route at all. There's An AI For That lists one indie tool a month for free, picked from a thread on X. Future Tools takes free submissions and says it approves fewer than a quarter of them. Supertools still describes a free email route that two third-party write-ups from August say is gone.

The direction is one way. AIxploria's update page says "We no longer offer free listings". BetaList's FAQ says free submissions were discontinued, and Tekpon's says it no longer offers a free listing. Futurepedia's old free submission page returns 404. Open Launch has a free plan on paper, with its free slots booked into 2027.

The badge economy

Where a free route survives, it often has a price that is not money. Of the 66 free routes, 11 require a badge or a link back to the directory on your own site before they list you, and nine more use the badge as a currency for something else: skipping the queue, keeping a followed link, a faster review or a better rank.

What the 66 free routes ask in return, October 10, 2026

No badge or link asked46 routes
A badge or link back, as the condition11 routes
A badge or link back, to skip a queue or keep a followed link9 routes

The 11 that make the badge a condition are five AI directories, Dang.ai, ToolPilot, What's the Big Data, AiHubs and AI Tools Saver, and six launch and startup sites: Fazier, Twelve Tools, Startup Fame, EarlyHunt, Smol Launch and Findly.tools. None of the 11 is among the top 200,000 sites on the Tranco list, and four are not in its top million. The badge reads as the way younger sites collect links from founders who will not pay in cash. Uneed uses votes the same way: a free launch needs an upvote score of 10 to stay published and 20 to keep its followed link.

ToolPilot is the clearest case of the shift. It now makes the badge mandatory for its free tier, and the free queue there is still quoted at up to 60 to 90 days. Google's spam policies count a link required as part of an arrangement, without letting the site owner qualify it with nofollow, as a link scheme; the backlinks guide covers what that means for a badge.

What a paid listing costs

Fifty-three live places publish a one-time price for the cheapest way onto the site. We took the listing tier by name from each price list and left out banners, newsletter slots, "outrank" boards and update fees. The range runs from $5, AlternativeTo's priority review, to $599, What's the Big Data's basic listing. The overall median is $39. At AI directories it is $49 (33 places, middle half $19 to $99); at launch platforms and startup directories, $24 (20 places, middle half about $14 to $39). Four places charge exactly $49.

Cheapest one-time price to get listed, 53 live places, October 10, 2026

Under $2020 places
$20 to $4915 places
$50 to $9911 places
$100 to $1994 places
$200 or more3 places

Seven more sell entry only as a subscription, or without saying how often you pay, from SaaS AI Tools at $67 a month to AI Tools Club's call-booked packages from $790 a month.

Prices that moved, moved up. In our mid-August check, There's An AI For That's top tier was $347; on October 10 its launch page said $437, 26% more in eight weeks. Futurepedia's $247 basic tier is gone, leaving one $497 package. Easy With AI charges $125 for a listing that its own featured page calls "originally $79.99".

What a listing costs has little to do with how many people visit the site. The most-visited AI directory in the set charges $49; one at almost the same rank as Dang.ai charges $599 to Dang's $49. Across AI directories, the median entry price is $49 among those inside the Tranco top million and about $44 among those outside it.

Cheapest one-time listing at the ten most-visited AI directories that publish one, in Tranco order

There's An AI For That, rank 29,506$49
Toolify, rank 49,691$99
Futurepedia, rank 130,575$497
TopAI.tools, rank 198,781$47
Dang.ai, rank 229,031$49
What's the Big Data, rank 230,362$599
AIxploria, rank 305,091$99
AI Mojo, rank 306,768$79
Aitoolnet, rank 322,911$9.90
AIPURE, rank 354,335$69.90

The queue is the product

Thirty-six of the 66 free routes say how long you will wait. Six publish at once because there is no review step: Product Hunt, Show HN, Indie Hackers, DEV, Peerlist and F6S. For the other 30, taking the longer end of any range, the median quoted wait is four weeks.

Quoted wait for a free listing, 30 places with a review step

Up to a week12 places
8 to 30 days6 places
1 to 3 months10 places
More than 3 months2 places

The two long tails are Uneed, which assigns a free launch date 30 days to about five months out, and OpenHunts, whose free queue showed about 60 weeks on October 10. AI directories that quote a time mostly promise a week (median of 15 places). The rest quote about a month (median of 15), and every launch board among them that queues free launches also sells a way past the queue, mostly for $10 to $49. In this part of the market the wait is what is for sale; the order to join the queues in is in the 30-day launch checklist.

OpenHunts, openhunts.com — the page's first screen — OpenHunts sells "high-DR backlinks" on its front page; its free queue was about 60 weeks long on October 10, and its badge skips it.OpenHunts profile →

What the link says

Of the 97 live places, 50 serve a plain link on the listings we read, 32 tag it nofollow, sponsored or ugc, eight send it through their own redirect, and on seven there was no ordinary link to read. AI directories lean plain: 32 of 53, against 18 of 44 elsewhere. Twenty-three places promise a followed link on their submission page; on six of them, the listings we read carried something else. The detail, place by place, is in the backlinks guide.

Authority is not audience

The number directories sell most is Domain Rating, Ahrefs' score of a site's backlink profile. A separate teardown of six fast-growing directories found the ones built mainly on badges, Twelve Tools, Startup Fame, ToolPilot and Fazier, with high scores and little search traffic; real search traffic showed up only at the two oldest, There's An AI For That and Dang.ai, both running since 2022. No traffic estimate was published for Fazier. Every traffic figure below is a third-party estimate, from Similarweb, Semrush and Ahrefs as published by trackers, on the dates given under the table.

Place	Domain Rating	Visits a month	From search
There's An AI For That	77	0.93M to 9.49M, by estimator	about half or more
Dang.ai	82	434,000	53%
ToolPilot	77 to 79	17,000 to 116,000	about 3,000 visits
Twelve Tools	82 to 83	25,000 to 50,000	12% to 26%
Startup Fame	83	about 4,000 (10,000+ by its own claim)	not estimated

Sources and dates: There's An AI For That, Semrush (June to August 2026) and LaunchPack (September 2026); Dang.ai, Similarweb (June to August 2026) as published by SubmitRank, with its DR check of September 10; ToolPilot, HypeStat (June to August, year not given) and saas-directories.com (undated); Twelve Tools, SubmitRank (Similarweb, July 2026) and LaunchPack (September 2026); Startup Fame, saas-directories.com (undated) and its own badge guide.

Twelve Tools' owner has said publicly that its DR took 4.7 million backlinks from 4,400 websites. One estimate puts its visits from US Google at about 780 a month. The scores are real; what they measure is links, and at these sites the links come largely from founders' badges. Two launch boards put both numbers on their own front page: Open Launch shows a Domain Rating of 71 beside 56,580 visitors since May 2025, and OpenHunts a DR of 72 beside 96,023 visitors in six months, by their own counters.

Open Launch, open-launch.com — the page's first screen — Open Launch's front page: a "certified domain rating" badge over the launch list, its own visitor counter in the sidebar.Open Launch profile →

The estimates also disagree with each other. For There's An AI For That they run from 0.93 million visits a month (LaunchPack, September) to 9.49 million (Semrush, August), a factor of ten. That is why the popularity ranks in this report come from the Tranco list, which averages several sources, and why no figure in this section should be quoted without its source.

What the search traffic is made of

The two directories with real search traffic get part of it from adult searches. In Semrush's June and August 2026 snapshots, the top keyword sending search visitors to There's An AI For That was an adult term, worth 9.5% of its search traffic, and in the same third-party data its top search-landing page was an internal search page for an adult query. Similarweb's top desktop keywords for Dang.ai, June to August 2026, were mostly names of adult AI services. These are third-party estimates on those dates, not a measure of either catalog's contents.

For a founder with a B2B tool, it is a reason to look at who a directory's visitors are before paying for the headline number. Directories' own rules split on the question: ten of the 97 publish one. Five keep adult tools out, four accept them on conditions (What's the Big Data adds a $100 surcharge), and one bars them from paid sponsorships only. The other 87 say nothing.

Where directories go when they die

Eleven places in the set are dead and two have stopped taking submissions. Eight of those 13 are AI directories: 13% of the 61 we started from.

What became of the 13 places that are dead or closed, October 10, 2026

Domain expired, parked or for sale4
Server does not answer3
Placeholder page2
Redirects to a different site2
Closed to new submissions2

Lists of "where to submit" are slow to notice. Clakr still described Neil Patel's AI tools directory as a free directory in June 2026; on October 10 its address redirected to an Ubersuggest page. Some dead places answer with a perfectly normal page, a placeholder or a domain-for-sale offer, which a check that reads only the status code would call alive, so each was read by hand. We track the same question for tools on the discontinued tools page.

Methodology

Source. One record per place, each checked by hand on the place's own pages on October 10, 2026, with its sources listed. Sites behind a bot check were read through a text-extraction service, and their link tags from Wayback Machine copies, dated in the record. Ten live records are marked low confidence.
Free route. Any route without payment the site itself describes, however narrow. "Badge required" follows each site's stated conditions; for AiHubs it comes from a third-party tracker.
Entry price. The cheapest one-time tier that gets a tool listed, picked by name from each price list. Banners, newsletters, ranking boards, update and claim fees are excluded. Prices in other currencies, or shown only after sign-in, are left out.
Wait. As quoted by the site, or by a dated hands-on test where the site is silent, taking the longer end of any range. Thirty free routes quote no time and are not in the chart.
Link. The rel attribute of the main outbound link on the listings we read; "own redirect" means a /go-style hop with no tag.
Popularity. Tranco list 8PX5V of October 9, 2026, matched on the exact host. Not in the list means outside the top million.
Traffic and Domain Rating. Third-party estimates, not our measurements, with source and date. They disagree with each other by up to ten times.
Limits. A snapshot, not a census: there are hundreds more directories. Prices change weekly. A listing's link can differ by plan. Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice share one vendor form but are counted as three places. We created no accounts and paid for nothing.

EffectHub is a directory itself, so it is left out of every count. The live places checked with medium or high confidence are listed on our AI directories and launch platforms pages, 82 of them with a profile that shows the evidence behind every field; those pages leave out low-confidence records, so some of their counts differ slightly from this report's.

Cite this

On October 10, 2026, 66 of 97 live AI directories and launch sites offered a free listing, 20 of those free routes asked for a badge or a link back, and the median one-time paid listing at AI directories was $49 (EffectHub, State of AI directories, October 2026).