Every week someone posts a list of 80 places to launch your startup. I put two of my own products through the real ones this month and pulled the live Domain Rating of every site that took us. About 60 of the 80 are a waste of time: paid sites that look free, dead links, and directories that want a company and reviews you do not have yet.
Here is the shorter list, with what each site is for. Domain Rating is Ahrefs's 0 to 100 authority score, pulled in September 2026. The numbers drift a few points a month; the tiers do not.
What a launch listing does, and does not do
Directories barely send traffic. Across three months and about twenty listings, the best one sent 7 engaged visits. One post on X sent 48. If you list your product to get visitors, you will be disappointed by Friday.
They do three other things, and those are worth an afternoon. A listing is a page a search engine already crawls, which links to a site it has never seen; that is how a new domain gets found. A listing on a page that is open to search, with a plain link rather than one marked nofollow, passes some of that page's authority to yours. And a listing is a page an AI assistant reads when a buyer asks it which tool to use; a product described in one identical sentence on six sites is easier to name than one that exists only on its own homepage.
So the plan is not "list everywhere". It is: the two launch days for attention, four levers for authority, one badge row for the dofollow tier, a short free batch, and skip the rest.
The big launch day: attention, not links
Product Hunt (91) and Hacker News / Show HN (91) are the two places that send real visitors on the day. Both link with nofollow, and the Show HN page carries noindex, so neither moves search directly. Treat them as the launch event: pick the date, prepare the first comment, be online. Do not treat them as SEO.
The levers most lists skip
Republish one guide with a canonical tag. Medium (94), DEV Community (91) and Hashnode (91) all let you set a canonical URL pointing back to the original on your site. The original keeps the search credit, and you get a real link plus a new audience. Rework one guide into a first-person maker post, set the canonical, publish. Space the three by a week so it does not look like a burst. (This post is exactly that: the original lives on frontstat.com.)
One G2 form, four listings. G2 (91) approves a free product profile within minutes if the site is a real B2B product, and the same submission cross-publishes to Capterra (91), GetApp (85) and Software Advice (87), each subject to its own verification. Decline every paid option on the way; the free profile is the entity that matters. If your account was created with a company that is not the product's, check the vendor fields before you submit: they prefill from the account.
Free and dofollow, in exchange for a badge
Five sites give a plain link once a "Featured on" badge sits on your homepage: Fazier (83), Turbo0 (80), SimilarLabs (69), Huzzler (64) and EasyLaunch (57). This is the only genuine dofollow cluster in the whole directory tail, and it is free.
The method: add one badge row to the homepage footer (the verifiers check the homepage, not a deep page), deploy, then click each site's verify button. EasyLaunch and Fazier go live the same day; Turbo0 and Huzzler review within weeks; SimilarLabs after approval.
Cap it. Five badges in a footer is a "Featured on" strip. Twelve is a link farm, and Google's link-spam policy reads it the same way you do.
Free, worth two minutes each
- SaaSHub (80): free listing, queue. Skip the priority upsell.
- AlternativeTo (80): submit the product and name the tools you are an alternative to; the alternative pages are where the visits come from.
- Uneed (75): dofollow, but the free plan queues one launch per account at a time.
- StartupBase (73): same rule, one free launch queued at a time, four to five weeks.
- PitchWall (68): free launch, thirty-day queue, nofollow on the free tier. Worth it for the citation, not the link.
- aitools.inc (67): a no-login form, if your product touches AI.
- VibeCodingList (49): small, but it was the one directory that sent traffic.
- Gravatar (97), about.me (90) and WIP (56): profile links, nofollow, still real. A backlink profile that is 100 percent dofollow looks manufactured; these are the natural mix.
Skip, and why
Free listing, paid link or launch. As of September 2026 the free tier on BetaList (76), Dev Hunt (63), There's An AI For That (77), Futurepedia (72), Toolify (73), Future Tools (69), Microlaunch (64), Toolfolio (35), Open Launch (72) and Findly (81) either does not include the launch, does not include the link, or sits behind a queue measured in seasons. Paid placement is a choice, not a trick; just know that "free" here means the form, not the result.
Sales-gated. SaaSworthy routes every tier, including the free one, to a call. GoodFirms verifies through a research team and wants a company entity with reviews.
Wrong shape. Crunchbase and Wellfound are company directories. If you are listing a product rather than a company, they demand a profile you do not have and tie the product to whatever entity you do have.
Dead or drifted. Several names on the long lists redirect, 404, or now host gambling pages. Open every URL before you spend a minute on the form.
The order that fits in one afternoon
- Write the copy kit once: name, URL, a tagline under ten words, a one-liner, 50 and 100 words, ten keywords, a square logo and three screenshots. Every form is a paste after that.
- G2, and let it cross-publish.
- Add the badge row, deploy, then Fazier, EasyLaunch, Turbo0, Huzzler, SimilarLabs.
- The two-minute batch, in the order above.
- A week later, republish one guide with a canonical to DEV Community, then Hashnode, then Medium.
- Check which of your listings count. I built FrontStat for this step: paste your URL and the report shows which listings pass links that count, where you rank for your own name, and whether ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini recommend you when a buyer asks. Launches that reach the front page get the report free.
The lists of 80 are written to be saved. This one is written to be finished by dinner.
Originally published as Where to launch a product in 2026 on frontstat.com.
