Software directories with verified submission requirements

How to use this database

Each row is a third-party directory whose public site and submission route were checked on the check date, with its gates recorded. Work through it in three passes: fit, friction, then a fresh look at the route itself.

Two tools cover the work around it: keep one listing profile in the directory submission template and record what you submit in the submission tracker.

Choose by product fit

Start with fit. A directory that does not list your kind of product will not help, however short its form is. Of the verified directories, 168 of 323 (52.0%) list general software/SaaS or startup products, 118 of 323 (36.5%) list AI products specifically, and 37 of 323 (11.5%) are scoped to another niche by category, such as developer tools, design or marketing.

Use the Product fit filter, or open the narrower views: SaaS directories and AI tool directories. Categories are the ones each directory lists, as classified in the check.

Check submission friction

Then look at what the route asks of you. Across the verified directories, a free path was observed on 240 of 323 (74.3%) and payment was required on 72 of 323 (22.3%). An account was required on 167 of 323 (51.7%); login was not determined for 60 of 323 (18.6%). A CAPTCHA that a person must solve appeared on 22 of 323 (6.8%). A badge or reciprocal link was required on at least 71 of 323 (22.0%), and the badge requirement was not determined for 83 of 323 (25.7%).

Status

Open means a free standard path was observed and no payment or badge was required. Gated means the route was blocked on the check date: paid (payment required, no free path), badge or reciprocal (a badge or reciprocal link on your site required), or owner-only (an owner-only vendor portal).

Observed gates

The “Fewest observed gates” sort counts how many of five gates were observed as required on the route: payment, login, badge or reciprocal link, human CAPTCHA and an owner-only step. Gates that were not determined are not counted, so a row with Not recorded cells may ask for more than it shows. Rows with the same count are not ordered further by this sort.

Last verified

The date of the most recent recorded check of that row in this snapshot.

Not recorded

The check did not determine this field for this directory. It is not the same as No.

Re-check requirements before you rely on them

Every row reflects one check, on the date in its Last verified column. A directory can change its prices, add a badge requirement, move to sign-in or retire its form without notice, so open the submission route and confirm a requirement before you plan around it.

A Not recorded cell means the check did not determine that field. Treat it as a question to answer on the directory's own page, not as a No.

What each requirement means

How this snapshot decides each label. The first sentence is the recorded definition; the rest explains how the value was derived and where the data stops.

Free path

A free standard submission path was observed on the site itself (not merely 'no price found').

Yes when a free standard submission path was observed on the directory's own site and payment was not recorded as mandatory; No when the free path was absent or payment was mandatory; otherwise Not recorded. Optional paid upgrades, such as featured placement or faster review, are not tracked, so Yes does not mean the directory sells nothing.

Login

Submitting requires signing in or creating an account (email/password, magic link or OAuth).

Yes (required) when a required sign-in, a required account or a Google-only sign-in was recorded; No only when both sign-in and account were recorded as not required; otherwise Not recorded. A Google-only sign-in was recorded for at least 10 of 323 (3.1%) verified directories and not determined for 177 of 323 (54.8%), so it is not a separate column.

No account is not the same as no gate. 96 of 323 (29.7%) verified directories were recorded as not requiring an account, and 32 of 96 (33.3%) were still gated on the check date: 19 of 96 needed payment with no free path and 13 of 96 a badge on your site. 7 of 96 showed a CAPTCHA a person must solve, and email verification was not determined for 72 of 96, so a no-account route can still end in a confirmation step. To see the no-account routes that were not gated, set Login to No and Status to Open in the table above.

Email verification

Completing the submission requires clicking a confirmation link or entering an emailed code.

This snapshot did not determine email verification for 293 of 323 (90.7%) verified directories. With that little coverage a column or a count would suggest a completeness the data does not have, so the table has no email-verification column and no count is published.

Badge

Listing requires placing a badge or reciprocal link on the product's site.

Yes (required) when a badge or reciprocal link was recorded as required, including directories gated for that reason; No when it was recorded as not required; otherwise Not recorded. Directories that were already gated by payment or owner-only onboarding account for most rows where the badge requirement was not determined, which is why badge figures here are lower bounds.

CAPTCHA

A challenge a human must solve appears on the submission route.

The check recorded the challenge type on each route: none on 235 of 323 (72.8%) verified directories, invisible (no human action) on 42 of 323 (13.0%), interactive on 22 of 323 (6.8%), and not determined on 24 of 323 (7.4%). The CAPTCHA column shows Yes only for interactive challenges; invisible ones count as No.

Identity

The flow needs something only the product owner can provide (e.g. owner login, company-domain email, owner profile, original long-form copy) or is an owner-only vendor portal.

This was recorded as required for at least 24 of 323 (7.4%) verified directories and not determined for 255 of 323 (78.9%), so the table has no identity column. Owner-only vendor portals are marked in the Status column, and owner-only steps that were observed count toward Observed gates.

Assets

Logo, screenshot, banner and icon requirements are not recorded in this snapshot. The table has no Assets column and no count is published; check each form for the images and text lengths it asks for.

How Zaptool verifies directories

The figures and rows on this page come from Zaptool's directory inventory check of 2026-09-27, frozen as snapshot zt-dir-20260927-cad0c427. Every candidate domain in the inventory was checked on that date (759 of 759 rows carry a check date). For each one the check recorded whether the site was live, where its submission route starts (when it had one), which product categories it lists (when stated), and whether each gate (payment, sign-in, badge or reciprocal link, CAPTCHA, owner-only steps) was observed as required, observed as not required, or not determined.

323 of 759 (42.6%) candidates were verified as directories whose submission requirements were recorded: 172 of 759 (22.7%) with an open route and 151 of 759 (19.9%) gated. The rest were excluded for a recorded reason or left unresolved (113 of 759); the submission-friction study breaks these groups down.

No submission URL was recorded for 24 of 323 (7.4%) verified directories: the check recorded their gates, but you will have to find the form on the directory's own site.

The check records what a directory's public route shows. It is not a log of completed submissions, approvals or review times, and this page does not publish link attributes.

Limits of this snapshot

• One round of checks on one date. A site that was briefly unreachable that day is not in the table even if it is back online now.
• Not recorded means not determined, never No. Shares of “required” count only observed requirements, so where many rows are undetermined the real share could be higher.
• There is no change history yet. This is the first snapshot, so there are no verified before/after differences to report; a changes section will only appear once a later snapshot can be compared with this one.
• Email verification, asset requirements, directory type (launch platform, review site, evergreen directory) and price amounts are not recorded well enough to publish.
• 1 of 323 (0.3%) verified directory was recorded as not active by the site check although its route was classified as verified; it is counted as recorded.
• Four directories that this snapshot records as open are held back from the table: a later spot check raised conflicting signals about their submission route. They stay in the statistics on this page, which describe the snapshot as recorded, and return to the table once re-checked.

What a directory listing can and cannot do

A listing can give your product a public profile on a site where people browse software, and it can be found by people who search that directory.

It does not come with promises. Each directory's operators decide whether and when to approve a listing, where it appears and how it links out. No listing guarantees rankings, domain rating, backlinks, traffic, leads, revenue or mentions in AI assistants' answers, and Zaptool does not claim otherwise.

What this database can do is save you from some dead ends: routes that were closed, paid-only or gated on the check date, and the gates recorded for each route. Whether a gate appears before or after the submit step was not recorded, so a gate can still come up later in a form.

Submitted, live and indexed are separate states: a submitted listing is not public yet, and a live listing is not necessarily in a search engine's results. How to test whether AI assistants mention a product, without assuming that a listing caused it, is set out in directory submissions and AI search.