Directories have a bad reputation, and mostly they have earned it. Scrape a few thousand product URLs, spin up pages, sell a "featured" slot, wait for the traffic. The listings are thin, half the links are dead within a year, and nobody who reads one comes away knowing whether the tool is any good.
We are trying to do the boring opposite of that. Every submission is opened by a person before it goes live. This post is that person's checklist, written down.
The four questions we ask
Does it exist and work? We open the site. We look for a pricing page, docs, a changelog, a repo with commits from this year. A landing page with a waitlist form and nothing behind it is not a product yet. Come back when it is.
Can we tell what it does in one sentence? If we cannot write your short description without guessing, neither can anyone else. "AI-powered platform for modern teams" describes about nine thousand products. "Two-way Google Sheets sync with conflict resolution" describes exactly one.
Is the category honest? Everything wants to be in AI Tools right now. If your product is a scheduling app with a summarisation feature, it belongs in SaaS, and it will get more qualified clicks there anyway.
Would we tell a colleague about it? This is the fuzzy one, and it is the one that matters. We are not asking whether the tool is famous. Plenty of listings here have under a hundred users. We are asking whether someone with the problem this solves would be glad to find it.
What gets rejected
Three things, mostly.
- SEO spam. Backlink farms, content spinners, anything whose pitch is "rank overnight". Instant no.
- Dead or abandoned projects. A repo whose last commit is three years old and whose issues are unanswered is not a tool, it is an artefact. We will happily list it again if it comes back.
- Listings that are really ads. If the description is three paragraphs of superlatives and no specifics, we will rewrite it or send it back. Usually we just rewrite it.
We do not reject things for being small, free, unpolished, or competitive with something already listed. Those are all fine.
Why the queue is slow on purpose
Submissions sit in a review queue rather than publishing instantly. This costs us submissions — some people paste a URL, see "pending", and never come back. We have decided that is an acceptable trade.
The alternative is a directory where the listing next to yours is garbage, which quietly devalues yours too. The whole point of being in a curated list is that someone did the curating.
If you got rejected
You will see the reason on your listing. Most rejections are fixable in ten minutes — usually the description was too vague or the category was wrong. Edit and resubmit. We are not keeping a blacklist.
And if you think we got it wrong, say so. We have reversed decisions before, generally when the maker explained a use case we had not thought of. That is a good outcome for everyone.
Where to go next
If your tool clears those four questions, we would like to see it. Submit a listing — it takes about ten minutes if you have your description and a screenshot ready, and a person reads every one.
Not sure it is ready yet? Read how the review process works first, or have a look at what is already listed to see the bar we are describing. Browsing the AI Tools and SaaS categories for ten minutes will tell you more than this post did.