How to Submit Your App to AppRater, and Where Web Products Fit
AppRater (apprater.net) describes itself as an independent app archive and the oldest listing in it is from January 2012. It is free, there is no account and the form lives in a section of the homepage instead of on a page of its own. Eight boxes, one button and a promise underneath: every submission is reviewed before it appears in the archive. Ahrefs rates the domain 17.
We cover this one, so the walkthrough below is the job as we run it. The part worth reading before you decide it is not for you is what the archive is actually made of, because the answer changed this year.
Of the 10,085 listings read on 18 August 2026, 9,376 are iOS, 676 are Android and 33 are Web. Every one of those 33 web listings carries a date between 14 and 18 August 2026, so the category is days old rather than merely new. The select has a fourth option, Other, which none of the 10,085 uses.
AppRater submission at a glance
| Feature | AppRater |
|---|---|
| What it is | An independent app archive |
| Where | A section of the homepage |
| Account | None for submitters |
| The form | 8 boxes, 6 of them required |
| Description | 40 to 2,000 characters |
| Platforms | iOS, Android, Web, Other |
| Archive | 10,085 listings, oldest Jan 2012 |
| Price | Free, or $10 a month to promote |
| Turnaround | Not published anywhere |
| Links | rel=noreferrer to a 307 redirect |
| Domain | DR 17 on Ahrefs |
Per apprater.net, its robots.txt, its sitemap, the homepage including the submission section, /contact, /legal, /terms, /privacy and /cookies, plus a census of every listing in the sitemap, read on 18 August 2026. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' figure via submitator.com/domain-rating-checker; no second provider was queried. Nothing was submitted and no payment was made. Field names, types, limits and the option list are read from the served markup of the form, which renders server-side in full: title required with minLength 2 and maxLength 120, platform a required select of iOS, Android, Web and Other behind a disabled 'Select platform' placeholder, appUrl required and typed url with maxLength 2048, description required with minLength 40 and maxLength 2000, tags optional with maxLength 240, imageUrl optional and typed url, submitterName required with minLength 2 and maxLength 80, submitterEmail required and typed email with maxLength 254, plus a hidden input named website with tabindex -1 that is a spam trap. The sitemap is a single flat file of 10,186 entries: 10,180 listings at /a/ plus the homepage and five legal pages. The census fetched all 10,180; 10,085 returned a listing and 95 returned an error or a redirect. Across those 10,085 the outbound button is an anchor to /visit/ plus the slug carrying rel='noreferrer' on all 10,082 that have one, with no nofollow token anywhere and no anchor pointing directly at the listed product; the only third-party hosts linked from a listing are the operator's own paypal.me and x.com, on every page. /visit/ answers HTTP 307 with the submitted URL in the Location header, and robots.txt disallows only /admin/ and /api/. What a 307 through a crawlable path is worth to a search engine is not documented by anyone, so this page describes the mechanics and stops there. Meta robots is 'index, follow' on 10,084 of the 10,085 and all 10,085 are their own canonical. Platform, publication date, tags and image are taken from each listing's SoftwareApplication JSON-LD: 9,376 iOS, 676 Android, 33 Web and no Other; dates run from 2012-01-10 to 18 August 2026, with 127 in August 2026 of which 33 are Web, all 33 of those dated between 14 and 18 August; the dates are not uniformly first-publication times, since 1,477 records carry a timestamp at the same minute and second range (895 in 2024, 353 in 2025, 222 in 2026) and Internet Archive captures of three of them, /a/grailify-sneaker-releases-restocks-news, /a/olvy-the-joy-of-shipping-software and /a/calorious, exist from 2020 and 2021 against their current 2026 dates, so year counts are read as dates on record; 117 of the 127 August records carry no such signature; 931 listings carry no tag and the median is 3 against a maximum of 8; 7,759 carry an image. The promotion block appears on 10,080 of the 10,085 and offers two plans, 'Monthly - $10 USD per month' and 'Quarterly - $35 USD every 3 months', each with its own PayPal button id; which plan renders varies per request rather than per listing, measured as nine quarterly and three monthly across twelve loads of the same listing. Renewal and refund wording is quoted from a listing and from /terms, which is dated 14 August 2026. Submitator submits here as part of its catalog: $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, one-time, chosen by you in the dashboard with DR shown, badges installed and kept live, a live link per completed listing, rejections credited back as +1 directory and a 30-day refund policy on the conditions in our terms.
The AppRater form: eight boxes, six of them required
The form puts no asterisks on anything, so here is what the markup enforces. Two boxes are genuinely optional and the rest will stop you.
- App nameRequired, 2 to 120 characters
- PlatformRequired, four options
- App or store URLRequired, typed as a URL
- What makes it useful?Required, 40 to 2,000 characters
- TagsOptional, up to 240 characters, comma separated
- Image URLOptional, typed as a URL
- Your nameRequired, 2 to 80 characters
- EmailRequired, and not published on the listing
How to submit to AppRater, step by step
- 1
Write the description first, and give it room
What makes it useful? is the one box that decides how the listing reads, and it has a floor: it will not submit under 40 characters, and it stops at 2,000. Whatever you put there becomes the About the product block on your page, the description in the page's structured data and the text on your card in the archive. Two or three sentences about what the thing does for whom will read better than the blurb from your store page, which is what a lot of the archive reads like.
- 2
Pick the platform honestly, and know the company you keep
Four options: iOS, Android, Web and Other. If you have a mobile app this is squarely its kind of place. If you have a web product you are early rather than unwelcome, since every web listing in the archive is dated within the same five days of August 2026. Not one of the 10,085 listings read uses Other, so it is not the safe hedge it looks like.
- 3
Use a URL people can act on
The field is App or store URL and the browser validates it as one, so it wants the https:// on the front rather than a bare domain. Send the App Store or Play listing if you have one, since that is what the archive is built around, and your own site if you do not.
- 4
Add tags even though they are optional
The box takes a comma-separated line up to 240 characters and their own placeholder shows the shape with Productivity, Finance, Indie. It is worth the thirty seconds: 931 listings in the archive carry no tag at all, the median across the archive is three and the most any listing carries is eight. Tags render as their own row in the product details.
- 5
Add an image, because 2,326 listings do not have one
Image URL is the other optional field and it takes a link rather than an upload, so it has to be an address that is already public. Listings without one fall back to a single letter in a box, which is what a quarter of the archive looks like.
- 6
Fill your name and email, and leave the hidden box alone
Both are required, and their privacy policy says addresses "are used for moderation and are not intentionally published". The form also carries an input named website, kept off screen by its styling rather than by a hidden attribute, which exists to catch bots, so if your browser autofills everything on a page, give that one a look before you press the button.
- 7
Send it, and keep your own record
The button reads Submit for review and the line above it is the only commitment on offer: every submission is reviewed before it appears in the archive. No timeframe is published anywhere on the domain, and their terms say plainly that "Submission does not guarantee review, publication, placement, traffic, ratings, or continued availability." So keep your own record of when it went, since there is no status page and no queue position.
What a finished listing carries
A page at /a/ plus your slug, with a platform pill, the date on the record, your name for the product, a Visit button, an About the product block holding the description you wrote, a Product details panel repeating platform, publication date and tags, the promotion offer and a Community notes section for feedback and product updates.
The page is set up properly for a site this size. All 10,085 listings are their own canonical and 10,084 of them carry a robots meta of index, follow. Each one emits SoftwareApplication structured data holding your name, description, platform and publication date, with your tags in it when you supplied any. Your description does triple duty as the About block, the structured data and the card text, which is the argument for spending the time on that one box.
What the link is, exactly
The Visit button is an anchor to /visit/ plus your slug carrying rel="noreferrer", and that address answers a 307 to the URL you submitted. Of the 10,085 listings read, 10,082 carry that button, every one of those carried the same rel, and no nofollow token turned up on any of them. None of them links directly at the product it describes either. The only third-party addresses anchored on a listing are the operator's own PayPal and X, and they are on every page.
Two details sit alongside that and are worth having straight. Their robots.txt blocks only /admin/ and /api/, so the redirect path is not closed to crawlers the way some sites close theirs. What a search engine then does with a 307 is its own business, so the mechanics above are the fact and the rest is guesswork.
The promotion, and what it is not
The offer sits on 10,080 of the 10,085 listings: "Feature this product across AppRater and help more people discover it. Choose a subscription and continue securely with PayPal." It comes in two plans, "Monthly - $10 USD per month" and "Quarterly - $35 USD every 3 months", and which one the block shows changes between page loads rather than between listings. Twelve loads of the same listing returned the quarterly plan nine times and the monthly one three times, each with its own PayPal button, so the plan you are being offered is worth reading before you click. Three months of the monthly plan is $30. It is a subscription, and the listing says so: "Promotion starts after approval and renews until canceled through PayPal."
What it does not touch is whether you get in. Their terms separate the two cleanly, that promotion "is optional, begins only for approved listings, and does not influence editorial approval". Money after approval, in other words, never instead of it. The refund position is the usual one for a subscription of this kind: amounts already charged are "generally non-refundable", so the cancel date matters more than the purchase date.
Who runs it, and how alive it is
One person. The contact page says "Send a note directly to Andrei" and gives andrei@apprater.net, the legal notice names AppRater as the operator with no company or address behind it, and the privacy policy refers to a single authorized administrator. The stack it names is small and ordinary: DigitalOcean for hosting, Brevo for mail, Google for consented analytics and the admin sign-in, PayPal for money. The legal pages all carry an effective date of 14 August 2026.
The records run from 10 January 2012 to 18 August 2026, and the site is clearly working rather than parked. Read the year counts as dates on record rather than as intake, though. 1,477 listings carry a machine timestamp shared across 2024, 2025 and 2026, including 222 of the 1,086 dated 2026, and three listings we checked with a 2026 date were already in the Internet Archive in 2020 and 2021. The 117 August records without that signature are the closer thing to a month of arrivals.
Every archive has a shape.
This one collects apps, the next one collects AI tools and the one after that wants a badge on your homepage. Working out which is which is the slow part, and it is already done.
Worth doing?
Yes, and the cost of entry is a description written properly. No account, no badge to install, no payment, an indexable page with structured data on it, a link through a redirect their own robots.txt leaves open and an operator who answers from a named address. At DR 17 the domain is a modest one, so treat this as a listing in a long-running archive rather than as a link play.
Match the product to the shelf and it is a good fit. A mobile app belongs here without argument. A web product belongs here as one of the first, which is a different kind of opportunity and worth taking while the category is small.
Eight boxes. Six of them required.
Free, no account, the form is a section of the homepage. The description will not send under 40 characters and it becomes your whole listing. Tags and the image are the only optional boxes and most listings fill them anyway: 931 of 10,085 carry no tag and 2,326 carry no image. Nine in ten entries are iOS, and every web listing on record is dated inside one week of August 2026. The whole catalog.
FAQ
Is AppRater free to submit to?
Yes. The form is a section of the homepage, it takes no payment and there is no account to create first. The one thing money buys is promotion of a listing that already exists: a subscription billed through PayPal, offered as either "Monthly - $10 USD per month" or "Quarterly - $35 USD every 3 months". Their terms keep the two apart, that promotion "begins only for approved listings, and does not influence editorial approval", so paying cannot get an app into the archive that would not have got in anyway.
Do you need an account to submit to AppRater?
No. There is no sign-up on the site and no reader-facing login; the only sign-in is the operator's own admin page, which is noindex and out of the sitemap. You give a name and an email inside the form itself, and their privacy policy says email addresses "are used for moderation and are not intentionally published", which matches the label on the field.
What does the AppRater submission form ask for?
Eight boxes, and this is the part worth knowing before you open it: six of them are required and the form marks none of them. App name (2 to 120 characters), Platform, App or store URL, What makes it useful? (40 to 2,000 characters), Tags, Image URL, Your name (2 to 80) and Email. Tags and Image URL are the two that are genuinely optional. There is also an input named website, kept off screen by its styling, which is a spam trap and needs to stay empty, so watch it if your browser fills in everything it finds.
What platforms does AppRater accept?
The select offers four: iOS, Android, Web and Other. What the archive actually holds is lopsided. Across 10,085 listings read on 18 August 2026, 9,376 are iOS, 676 are Android and 33 are Web, and not one of them uses Other. The web option is also days old rather than merely new: every one of those 33 listings is dated between 14 and 18 August 2026.
How long does AppRater take to publish a listing?
They do not say. The form promises a review, "Every submission is reviewed before it appears in the archive", and no timeframe appears anywhere on the domain, not on the homepage and not in the terms. Their terms are also plain that the review is not owed to you: "Submission does not guarantee review, publication, placement, traffic, ratings, or continued availability." So the only record of when it went is the one you keep.
Does an AppRater listing link to your app?
Through a redirect on their own domain. The button on a listing is an anchor to /visit/ plus your slug, carrying rel="noreferrer", and that address answers a 307 to the URL you submitted. Of the 10,085 listings read, 10,082 carry that button and every one of those carried the same rel, with no nofollow token found on any of them, and the only third-party addresses linked directly from a listing are the operator's own PayPal and X. Two things worth noting alongside it: /visit/ is not disallowed in their robots.txt, which only blocks /admin/ and /api/, and the pages themselves are set up for it, with 10,084 of the 10,085 carrying index, follow and every one of them its own canonical.
What does the $35 AppRater promotion buy?
Placement, not approval. The block sits on 10,080 of the 10,085 listings and reads "Feature this product across AppRater and help more people discover it. Choose a subscription and continue securely with PayPal.", priced at "Quarterly - $35 USD every 3 months". There are two plans, "Monthly - $10 USD per month" and "Quarterly - $35 USD every 3 months", and which of them the block shows varies from one page load to the next rather than by listing, so check which one you are looking at before you click. Either way it is a subscription: "Promotion starts after approval and renews until canceled through PayPal." Their terms add that charges already taken are "generally non-refundable", so cancel before the next billing date if you only want one quarter.
Is AppRater the same as WebAppRater?
No, and the names are close enough to be worth separating. This guide is about apprater.net, an independent app archive we submit to. WebAppRater is webapprater.com, a different site that sells paid review posts, and we do not submit there. If you landed here looking for that one, our guide to it is a separate page.
Does Submitator submit to AppRater?
Yes, this one is on our list. The thing to settle first is which of your products belongs here, because it is an app archive before it is anything else: a mobile app is squarely what it collects and a web product is the newer arrival. Our entry plan covers thirty directories for $29, and the picking happens before anything leaves.
More submit-to guides.
Put each product where it fits.
$29 covers thirty directories, chosen by you from a catalog that names every one and shows what it is rated, so nothing goes to a shelf it does not belong on.