Free Is Sold Out at AI Chief. The Cheapest Tier Left Costs $20 More Than a Hundred Directories Here.
Written by Submitator, a competing directory-submission service that does not submit to AI Chief. Their words are quoted from their own pages as they read on 11 October 2026, and the footnote under the table names every source.
AI Chief (the site spells it AIChief) has closed its free door. On its submit page, on 11 October 2026, the $0 Free Listing card reads Sold Out, its button is disabled and the line above the cards says "Free submissions are currently sold out. Pick a paid tier to get your tool live faster." The cheapest tier you can still buy is the Verified Listing at $99, for one listing on one site. The Featured Listing is $149.
That $99 is $20 more than our Scale plan, which covers a hundred directories for $79. Starter covers thirty for $29. And the details are yours to supply: by their own docs, you fill in the features, pricing plans, tags, images and FAQs after paying. We write a unique description for every directory you pick.
| Tier | Price | What the card says |
|---|---|---|
| Free Listing | $0 | A Sold Out ribbon and a disabled Sold Out button. Six lines: Manual Editorial Review, AI Tool Listing, Category Placement, Permanent Listing, Basic Tool Information and Lifetime Do Follow Backlink |
| Verified Listing | $99 | Tagged Most Popular and Closing soon. The free six plus eleven more, among them Verified Badge, Priority Review 24 Hours, Company Website Link and Social Links |
| Featured Listing | $149 | Verified's seventeen plus eleven more, among them Ad-Free Tool Page, Detailed Analytics Dashboard, Homepage Featured Placement 24 Hours and Priority Support |
| Gold Tier · Build Your Own | From $99 | "Pick exactly what you want from 19 features." Four lines: Pick any 19 features, Interactive go-live calendar, Gold badge at $200+ and Account manager. Under the button: "Avg. customer spends $247 · 70% unlock gold" |
The card: Sold Out, button disabled. The FAQ further down the same page, under "Do You Offer Free Submission?": "Yes, we offer both free and paid submission options!" Their docs, last updated 16 July 2026: "Listing an AI tool is free." Only one of those decides what you pay, and it is the button.
AI Chief submission at a glance
| Feature | AI Chief |
|---|---|
| What it is | An AI tools directory run by AIChief LLC, New York |
| Where | /submit-ai-tool/ |
| Free Listing | $0, shown Sold Out, button disabled |
| Their FAQ on free | "Yes, we offer both free and paid submission options!" |
| Cheapest open tier | Verified Listing, $99, one listing |
| Next tier | Featured Listing, $149 |
| Build your own | From $99 plus add-ons; "Avg. customer spends $247" |
| Who fills in the details | You, after paying: features, pricing, tags, images, FAQs |
| "Competitor" on the checkbox | Rejection without refund; defined nowhere |
| Link promise | "Lifetime Do Follow Backlink" on the Free, Verified and Featured cards |
| Domain | DR 55 on Ahrefs |
| Submitator's Scale plan | 100 directories for $79, $20 less, each picked by you |
Per aichief.com, read on 11 October 2026 between 14:00 and 14:40 UTC with plain GET requests; nothing was submitted, no checkout was opened and no account was created. Pages read: /submit-ai-tool/ (the tier cards, the line above them, the four-step block and the FAQ), the home page, /faq/, /docs/ and its articles /docs/submit-an-ai-tool/, /docs/plans-addons-and-coupons/, /docs/submission-overview/ and /docs/getting-published/ (each "Last updated July 16, 2026"), /terms-of-services/ ("Last updated: April 10, 2025"), /about-aichief/, /editorial-policy/, /contact/, /update-ai-tool/, /advertise/, /newsletter-sponsorship/, robots.txt, llms.txt and the 37 sitemaps listed in /sitemap_index.xml, together with the plan, add-on and site-metrics data those pages load and the code behind the submission form. Tier names, prices and lines are quoted from the live page and match the plan data line for line. Both screenshots are crops of our founder's captures of the page that day; the checkbox wording also matches the form's code character for character. The plan data dates the Verified and Featured Listing records to 13 January 2026 and the Free Listing record to 22 May 2026 at 10:38:40 UTC, with the record of the Fast Track Listing add-on for free submissions, $9 today, created at 10:37:03 UTC the same day and last edited on 15 July 2026; all three tiers were last edited on 17 July 2026 and the Free Listing record is still marked active. Those are record dates, not price histories. The Sold Out card with its disabled button is also recorded in pull request #97 to the GitHub list mmmmingos/where-to-submit-your-startup, merged on 7 October 2026. Neither the Wayback Machine nor Common Crawl holds a readable copy of the page to compare against: the Wayback Machine answers "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine." for aichief.com, and Common Crawl's captures of its pages are Cloudflare challenge pages. Indexed search-engine copies of their submit page (about May 2025) and update page (about January 2026) carry the phrase "we are no longer providing free AI tool submission". The April 2025 prices are quoted from "How to Access the World’s Top AI Tools with AIChief in One Platform", distributed as a release under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program on 29 April 2025. Refund quotations come from the submit page FAQ (repeated on /advertise/), the form checkbox and section 4 of the terms, whose only ground for rejection without refund is Adult/NSFW content. The word competitor appears in none of the submit page FAQ, docs, terms or editorial policy texts; the nearest use is a footer column headed Competitors that lists five AI directories. Audience figures are AIChief's own: on the submit page "50K daily visitors and 100k monthly searches" and 150K+ Monthly Searches; on the home page 50K Monthly Visitors; on the About page "Join over 150,000 subscribers"; on the newsletter sponsorship page "Reserve your placement and reach 17,000 subscribers who opted in to discover AI tools." and an average open rate of 15.46%; among the listing add-ons, Newsletter Feature +40% Open Rate at $100, and on /advertise/ the Market Dominator plan's "1x Newsletter Feature (40% Open Rate)". Their sitemaps hold 12,184 tool listing URLs once 307 editorial posts are set aside, against "12,195+ AI tools" in their llms.txt. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' figure via submitator.com/domain-rating-checker, which returned 55 on 11 October 2026; AIChief prints no Domain Rating of its own. We allege no penalty against AIChief. Submitator does not submit to AI Chief. Our plans are $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, each paid once and chosen by you in the dashboard with every Domain Rating shown. Submitator's founder states that we write a unique description for each directory to its own length rules and cut images to each site's format. Our terms set an aim of 2 to 3 days to file every directory in a package and commit us to delivering them within 21 days of purchase; a rejected submission is credited back as +1 directory to choose, and any directory not delivered within our committed ETA is refunded in proportion, on the conditions of our 30-day refund policy. The over-$140 figure adds up the paid tiers on nine directories at each directory's own list price, and two of the nine, AffyList and AlterBase, are owned by Submitator. At Scale a directory costs $0.79, so their $99 is about 125 directories' worth of our plan and their $149 about 189. Nothing here claims that AI Chief and any Submitator plan cover the same directories.
How to submit to AI Chief, step by step
- 1
Open the submit page and pass the free card
The Submit AI Tool page shows four cards. The $0 Free Listing reads Sold Out and its button is disabled, so the choice is the $99 Verified Listing, the $149 Featured Listing or the Build Your Own card, which starts from $99.
- 2
Press Choose Plan and fill in the form
Eight required fields: first name, last name, email, country, "Who are you?", "How did you hear about us?", tool name and website URL.
- 3
Read the checkbox before you tick it
It reads "I confirm that my tool is not Adult/NSFW or a competitor. I understand that violating this will result in rejection without refund." Their terms cover the Adult/NSFW part. No page defines competitor, so ask what it covers before you pay.
- 4
Add-ons, then payment
Add-ons stack on top of the plan, and their docs warn that "Some add-ons are priced per day, so the total moves when you change the duration." Payment is by card or PayPal.
- 5
Fill in the details yourself
After payment the dashboard asks for at least four key features, your pricing plans, at least three tags, at least two FAQs, a favicon and a featured image. Then the listing moves to Pending review.
- 6
Or put the $99 into a hundred directories
Scale costs $79 once and covers 100 directories. Your dashboard shows each one by name with its Domain Rating, and every directory you tick gets a description of its own, written by us.
Sold Out on the card, free in the FAQ
The free card has not been taken down. It still sits first on the page, priced $0 and described as "A no-cost way to get your tool into our review queue." A Sold Out ribbon runs across its corner, and the button under it, labelled Sold Out as well, cannot be pressed. A public GitHub list of launch sites recorded the same card, button disabled, on 7 October 2026.
The rest of their own site still offers the free route. The FAQ on the same page answers "Yes, we offer both free and paid submission options!" Their docs say "Listing an AI tool is free." and "You can list an AI tool for free." The About page invites you to "Submit for a free listing (subject to editorial review)".
Their docs price the free route in time, not in places: "Review takes longer because free submissions sit behind paid ones in the queue." No page says how many free places there were, or what ran out.
In their own plan data the free tier is the youngest of the three: the Free Listing record was created on 22 May 2026, four months after the Verified and Featured Listing records. Just before it, the same morning, came an add-on for free submissions called Fast Track Listing, $9 today, which offers to "bump your submission to the front of the queue". The paid way past the free queue is ninety-seven seconds older than the free queue.
$99 for one listing, and you still fill it in
With the free card shut, the cheapest thing you can buy on the page is the Verified Listing at $99. Its seventeen lines run from Verified Badge and Priority Review 24 Hours to Company Website Link and Lifetime Do Follow Backlink. The Featured Listing at $149 adds eleven more, among them an ad-free page, an analytics dashboard, 24 hours of homepage placement and priority support. Each one is one listing, on one site.
None of the seventeen lines is someone writing your listing. Their docs give the order: choose a plan, add any add-ons, pay, then fill in the details. The details are at least four key features, who the tool is best for, your pricing plans (a name, a price and a feature for each), at least three tags, at least two FAQs, a favicon and a featured image. Only then does the listing move to Pending review.
Doing it yourself used to cost less. A release distributed on HackerNoon on 29 April 2025, which signs off "reach out to us at the AIChief website", put the choice like this: "Whether you want AIChief experts to write content for you for $30, you can write it yourself for $15." Today the cheapest open tier is $99, and the details are still yours to fill in.
For each directory you pick, we write a unique description to its own length rules and cut your images to its format. A hundred directories cost $79 on Scale, $20 less than their cheapest open tier.
One word on the checkbox, defined nowhere
The form you fill in before paying makes you tick this: "I confirm that my tool is not Adult/NSFW or a competitor. I understand that violating this will result in rejection without refund." Their terms, section 4, name one ground for rejection without refund, "Adult/NSFW content", and stop there. No page on the site says what a competitor is.
Their FAQ promises a full, automatic refund when the editors turn a tool down. The checkbox is the exception to that promise, and the one word in it that can cost you the whole fee is defined nowhere. Ask what it covers before you pay $99.
Our own terms, for the record: a rejected submission is credited back as +1 directory for you to choose, and any directory we do not deliver within our committed ETA is refunded in proportion.
50K Visitors a Day, or 50K a Month
The submit page sells reach: "Ongoing discovery from 50K daily visitors and 100k monthly searches." The home page shows the same 50K labelled Monthly Visitors. Elsewhere on the submit page, under Growth-Focused Traffic, monthly searches read 150K+.
The newsletter splits the same way. The About page: "Join over 150,000 subscribers". The newsletter sponsorship page: "Reserve your placement and reach 17,000 subscribers who opted in to discover AI tools." Among the add-ons sold with a listing is a $100 one called Newsletter Feature +40% Open Rate, and their $499 Market Dominator plan lists "1x Newsletter Feature (40% Open Rate)"; the sponsorship page gives their average open rate as 15.46%.
Every one of those figures is theirs, and they do not agree with each other. Daily or monthly is a factor of thirty; 150,000 against 17,000 is almost a factor of nine.
"Up to 2x more cost-effective", at $99 a listing
Their FAQ answers "What Makes AIChief Different Than Other AI Directories?" with "Unlike other directories that charge high fees and offer little support, we keep things simple" and "Our one-time listing fee is up to 2x more cost-effective than others".
Here is that fee against ours. Their cheapest open tier is $99 for one listing on one site. Scale, our hundred-directory plan, costs $79. Their Featured Listing is $149, which is $70 more than Scale. And their own builder card offers a figure of its own: "Avg. customer spends $247".
On top of that, every plan of ours covers the paid upgrade on nine directories that charge for one. Bought yourself at their own prices, those upgrades come to over $140, and our savings list prices each one. The comparison needs no arithmetic: the cheapest door still open at AI Chief costs $20 more than a hundred directories here.
What holds up
Credit where it holds. AI Chief is run by a named company, AIChief LLC, which prints an address at 169 Madison Ave in New York, and its About page dates the directory to 16 February 2025. Ahrefs rates the domain 55, which is real authority. The tool count holds up too: they claim "12,195+ AI tools" and their sitemaps carry 12,184 tool listing pages.
Manual Editorial Review appears on the Free, Verified and Featured cards alike, the sold-out one included, and the docs back it with a heading that reads "Paying does not skip review". An upgrade costs only the difference between plans, and claiming a listing they already carry costs nothing.
Their $99: one listing. Our $79: a hundred directories.
One payment. Every directory is named in your dashboard with its Domain Rating on the card, each gets its own description and you tick the ones you want before anything is filed.
AI Chief review: is $99 worth it?
Only if you need aichief.com in particular. The $99 buys one page on a DR 55 site with seventeen lines on the card, and the details are yours to fill in. Know what their pages say about the rest before you pay. The free route their FAQ still offers is sold out. And the checkbox makes being "a competitor" grounds for rejection without refund but never defines the word.
Set it against our price and the decision needs no arithmetic. Their cheapest open tier costs $20 more than our Scale plan, and Scale covers a hundred directories.
Free is sold out. $99 for one listing, or $79 for a hundred.
AI Chief's $0 card reads Sold Out while its own FAQ still offers free submission. The cheapest tier left is $99 for one listing whose details you fill in yourself. The checkbox's no-refund clause rests on a word no page defines. Our Scale plan covers a hundred directories for $79, $20 less, with a description written for each. The whole catalog.
FAQ
How do I submit to AI Chief?
Open their Submit AI Tool page and press Choose Plan on the Verified Listing ($99) or Featured Listing ($149) card; the $0 Free Listing reads Sold Out and its button is disabled. Fill in the form that opens: first and last name, email, country, "Who are you?", "How did you hear about us?", tool name and website URL. Tick the box confirming your tool is not "Adult/NSFW or a competitor", add any add-ons, pay by card or PayPal, then fill in the listing details in your dashboard and submit them for review.
Is AI Chief free?
Not to submit, not today. On 11 October 2026 the Free Listing card on their submit page reads Sold Out, its button is disabled and the line above the cards says "Free submissions are currently sold out. Pick a paid tier to get your tool live faster." The FAQ further down the same page still answers "Yes, we offer both free and paid submission options!", and their docs still say "Listing an AI tool is free." The button is the part that decides. If AI Chief already lists your tool, their update page prices claiming it at $0.
How much does AI Chief cost?
The Verified Listing costs $99 and the Featured Listing $149; while the free card reads Sold Out, $99 is the cheapest way in. A fourth card, Gold Tier · Build Your Own, starts from $99 and adds your pick of 19 add-ons priced $15 to $120, nine of them per day; under its button it says "Avg. customer spends $247 · 70% unlock gold". Every one of those prices buys one listing on aichief.com. Our Scale plan is $79 for a hundred directories and Starter is $29 for thirty.
Is the AI Chief link dofollow?
Their cards say it is. The Free, Verified and Featured cards all list "Lifetime Do Follow Backlink", even the sold-out free one. Their FAQ has no answer on links, so the promise lives on the cards. Once your listing is live, open it and check the rel on the link to your site; the attribute is theirs to set.
What is AI Chief's DR?
55, read from Ahrefs through our checker on 11 October 2026. AI Chief prints no Domain Rating of its own. That is a strong domain, and it is one domain: the $99 buys a single listing on it.
What is the AI Chief Verified Badge?
The first of the seventeen lines on the $99 Verified Listing card; the Featured Listing at $149 carries it too. The four-step block on their submit page says "Each paid tier gets a permanent badge." The free card does not list one.
Does AI Chief refund a rejected submission?
Their submit page FAQ says: "We offer a full, automatic refund if our editorial team does not approve your AI tool." The form's checkbox carves out an exception: rejection "without refund" for a tool that is "Adult/NSFW or a competitor". Their terms name Adult/NSFW content alone, and no page defines competitor, so ask what it covers before you pay.
Is AI Chief legit?
As a business, yes. It is run by AIChief LLC, which gives a New York address and a support email on its contact page, its About page dates the directory to 16 February 2025 and Ahrefs rates the domain 55. Its tool count holds up as well: "12,195+ AI tools" claimed, 12,184 tool listing pages in its sitemaps. The trouble is in what its pages say: the free route its FAQ offers is sold out and its audience figures disagree from page to page. On refunds, its FAQ promises a full, automatic refund for a rejected tool while its docs say rejection is not a refund trigger by itself.
Is AI Chief worth $99?
Only if aichief.com is the one site you need. The $99 buys one listing on a DR 55 site, and the details are yours to supply: key features, pricing plans, tags, FAQs, a favicon and a featured image. Their FAQ calls the fee "up to 2x more cost-effective than others". Our Scale plan is $79, $20 less, and covers a hundred directories you pick, each with a description we write for it.
Does Submitator submit to AI Chief?
No. We cover other directories: Starter is thirty for $29, Growth sixty for $49 and Scale a hundred for $79, each paid once. You pick from a named list in your dashboard, every card showing its Domain Rating, and each pick gets its own description from us. If a directory rejects you, we credit you another to pick; refunds run on the 30-day conditions in our terms.
More submit-to guides.
$99 for one listing there. $79 for a hundred here.
One payment. Each directory is named with its Domain Rating on the card before you choose it, each gets a description written for it, badges are installed and kept live where one is wanted and a rejection is swapped for another directory.