50 free directories to submit your SaaS to in 2026

Most lists like this are padded. That's the main thing I learned building one.

I keep a catalog of 515 checked directories for my own products. When I sat down to pull the free ones out of it, the problem wasn't finding 100 names. It was that the names past about 50 stop being worth your time.

So this is 50. Sorted by domain rating, all free to submit, every link opened and checked in September 2026.

What I left out: general web directories from the 2000s SEO era (Brownbook, ExactSeek, SoMuch, A1 Bookmarks and friends), which have real domain ratings and are exactly why every "200+ directories" list is so long. Also AI-tool-only sites, which are in their own section at the bottom, and regional sites unless you're selling into that market.

The 50

Domain rating is from the catalog. Higher is better for a backlink, but it isn't the same as traffic, and most of these will send you neither.

If your product is an AI tool

Add these. If it isn't, skip them, you'll just get listed next to 4,000 GPT wrappers.

AI Tools by Neil Patel (DR 91), aitools.inc (DR 67), Toolify (DR 64), GPTs Hunter (DR 59), AI Tool Trek (DR 56), Super Tools by The Rundown (DR 55), Tool Pilot (DR 51), Future Tools (DR 44), AI Agents Directory (DR 41), Insidr AI (DR 40), Ben's Bites (DR 39), The Rundown (DR 38).

How I'd actually work this list

Do the top 10 properly. Real description, real screenshots, the category picked deliberately. Those are the ones with a chance of sending a human.

Then do the rest in a batch when you're tired and don't want to write code. It's good low-energy work: 20 minutes, no thinking, a few rows crossed off.

Don't do all 50 in a week. Some of these want a badge on your site, some have review queues that take a month, and a burst of 50 identical submissions is a pattern.

What to expect, honestly

I've been submitting since February across 5 products. Domain rating on my main domain went from 19 to 22. No directory has ever appeared as a referrer in my analytics, and I can't trace a single sale to a listing.

So I'd treat this as slow backlink work with a side of discoverability, not as a customer acquisition channel. Give it a few hours total and then go do something that actually moves revenue.

The part that actually annoyed me was tracking it. Same list across 5 products, statuses drifting out of date, spreadsheet dead by product number 2. I built a free tracker for that at beyondfolder.com/directories: the full 515-directory catalog, status per project, and an MCP endpoint so Claude Code can mark rows off while it works.