Directory Submission Cost: Free, Paid Tiers or a Service

Directory submission cost at a glance

The directory submission price of each route, ours included, one row each. The money column is what leaves your account; the last column is what each route still asks of you.

Per directory, the spread is wide: the nine paid tiers average $17.88 a listing, the services' smallest packages sit at a median $2.48, about 2.6 times our Starter's $0.97; our plans run down to $0.79 at 100 directories. The free route asks nothing at the checkout, so its price is counted in work, and that comes first.

Free vs paid directory submission: what a free listing asks of you

A free listing is paid for three ways. The first is time: every directory has its own form, its own fields and its own length rules for a description. The services put a number on it themselves. Findly.tools prints “Save 10 hours” on its 30-directory card and “Save 30 hours” on its 100-directory card, and ListingBott sells its 100 listings with “Save yourself 60 hours of work”.

The second is a badge, a snippet that goes on your site and has to stay there for the listing or its followed link to last. Our catalog records one at 42 of the 189 directories we submit to, on the route we file. The free cards we read on 10 November 2026 put it plainly: LiftOff's says “Required to display a badge on your site”, DeepLaunch's “Add our dofollow badge to your website and keep it there” and Show My Sites' “Link to us or badge · dofollow once we verify it”.

The third is the wait. A free line moves on the directory's clock: Uneed's free launch reads “We assign your launch date, at least 50 days out”, Startup Inspire's free plan says “No instant approval: every submission is reviewed manually before it is published (usually 3 to 7 business days)” and AlterBase, one of ours, has its free listings “Reviewed by a person within 7 days”. Uneed also closes its free line when it fills; through us you can always launch there. How the kinds of free listing differ, from badge-for-link to wait-in-line, is sorted in our post on free startup directories, and the directories that publish with no review queue in our list of instant approval directories.

Paid directory submission: nine paid directory listings, priced

Paid directories sell the same listing faster, without the badge or higher on the page. These are the paid tiers at nine directories we submit to, each read on the directory's own pricing page on 10 November 2026, each tier named the way the directory names it, beside what its free route asks.

Bought one by one, the nine come to $160.89, counting a euro as a dollar, and that buys nine listings with every form still yours to fill. Two of the nine, AffyList and AlterBase, are directories we own, and the table marks them. Where a directory's paid tier is what turns its free listing into a followed link, the price is weighed against the badge in our post on what a dofollow backlink costs.

Featured listing price: once, per launch or by the month

Directory listing cost is mostly a single payment. Of the nine, six are paid once and two are priced per launch, TryLaunch AI's Pro and Uneed's Fast-track. One bills by the month: DeepLaunch's Featured Listing at $29.90 a month, a plan that lists “10 featured submissions per month”, “No backlink required” and “Priority review” against a free listing that asks for its badge. Its own pricing FAQ says those benefits run “during the paid billing period”.

Directory submission packages: what 25 services charge

A directory submission service sells a count: 30, 60 or 100 directories for one payment, filed on your behalf. On 10 November 2026 we read the packages of 25 services on their own sites, the ones our comparison pages cover and the ones on page one for directory submission cost. Every price below was on the service's site that day, and each name links to our page comparing it with Submitator where we have one.

The smallest package cost a median $99, from LaunchZone Submissions' $29.70 to 100 Backlinks' $399, and a package of 100 directories or more a median $199. Every one of the 25 in the table asked more than our $29 to start and more than our $0.97 a directory on the count its smallest card prints, and every one of the 22 that sell 100 or more asked more than our $79 for it: the median card at that size is 2.5 times our Scale price.

Cheap directory submission: the smallest cards

The four smallest entry cards were LaunchZone Submissions' $29.70 for 30, JustLaunched's $49 for 40+, EasySubmits' $59 for 20 to 30 and Findly.tools' $59 for 30 directories, $0.99, $1.23 or less, $1.97 and $1.97 a directory on the count each card prints. Our Starter is $29 for 30, $0.97 a directory, with every directory chosen by you from a list that shows its Domain Rating.

Manual directory submission services

Of the 25, 19 say people do the submitting, in words such as “Manual submission by our team” on TryLaunch's Grow, “submitted by hand” on Uneed's Auto-Submit and “A real person submits each one by hand” on LaunchZone Submissions. The manual directory submission services on that list charged a median $99 for their smallest package and $199 for 100 directories or more. Our terms describe Submitator another way: “Submitator provides an automated submission service for startups to various online directories and platforms.” How the services compare beyond the price, on directory choice, speed and how the work gets done, is laid out in our comparison of directory submission services.

What Submitator costs, and what the payment covers

Submitator is paid once: $29 for 30 directories on Starter, $49 for 60 on Growth and $79 for 100 on Scale, which is $0.97, $0.82 and $0.79 a directory. All Directories is $149 once and covers the whole catalog, directories added after you buy included.

You pick from the dashboard, where every directory shows its Domain Rating, and the whole catalog is in the table of the 189 we submit to. A directory is listed there once one of our submissions to it has run all the way through. For each one you pick, we write a description of its own to that directory's limits and complete the form; CAPTCHAs are handled on our side. Where your picks want a badge, your site takes one component, once, which carries every badge they need; keeping each badge live is our part, and no directory ever needs a commit from you.

Once a listing page is live we push it through IndexMachine, the free indexing ($25 value) listed on Starter, Growth and Scale: nothing for you to connect, and Google still decides what it indexes. What a listing has to pass to count as a backlink is checked one test at a time in our post on directory backlinks.

The timing is in our terms: most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours, every directory within 21 days at most. If a directory rejects a submission, by default you get one more directory to pick in its place; All Directories works differently, since it already holds the whole catalog. A refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions in our terms.

Side by side: a month of DeepLaunch's Featured Listing is $29.90, and $29 with us covers 30 directories, DeepLaunch among them if you pick it. What to prepare before the first form is in our directory submission checklist, how often a filed listing goes live in our submission statistics, and what a link costs once it comes from an editor rather than a directory in our post on link building services.