£49 Buys One Listing Here. We Checked Who Else Is on the Board.
Written by Submitator, which sells directory submissions and therefore competes with this. Read it with that in mind, and check the numbers: every one is measured from their live listings and the method is in the footnote.
Startups.fm used to list you free if you kept its badge on your homepage. That is over. The badge page returns a 404 and the submit form now says it in bold: "Listings are paid — £49 one-off." No free tier, no badge route, no exceptions.
For that £49 you get one reviewed listing, in 48 hours, with what they describe as a "DR 49+ dofollow backlink". Their Domain Rating really is 49 and the link on recent submissions really does appear to be followed. The question is not whether they deliver. It is what you are joining.
Out of the 1,992 in their sitemap. Back came Fiverr, Hootsuite, Drata, ChartMogul, AssemblyAI, Doist, Bending Spoons and Iconfinder. The newest entries by their own sitemap are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, Cohere, ElevenLabs and Runway. Not one of those companies paid £49, and all 90 of the listings we sampled link out nofollow. The board is big because it was seeded, not because 1,988 founders bought in.
£49 for one listing, or $49 for sixty
| What you are buying | Startups.fm | Submitator |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £49 one-off | $49 one-time |
| What it covers | One listing | 60 directories you pick |
| Per listing | £49 | About $0.82 |
| Free route | Removed; the badge page is a 404 | n/a |
| The link | Followed on recent submissions | DR on every card, nofollow marked |
| Who else is listed | 90 of 90 sampled were nofollow seeds | You choose the list |
| Turnaround | 48 hours, stated | 24 to 48 hours, stated |
| Refund | None published | 30 days, on our terms |
Per startups.fm, its home page, its submit form and its sitemap, all read on 8 September 2026. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' figure via submitator.com/domain-rating-checker, which returned 49, matching the "DR 49+" the site claims for itself. The price, the 48-hour turnaround, the "Listings are paid — £49 one-off" notice and the "DR 49+ dofollow backlink" wording are quoted from their submit page; £49 exceeds $49 at every GBP-USD rate of the past decade, which is the only currency claim this page makes. Their previous free-with-badge route is gone: /badge, /pricing and /faq all return 404 and no free option appears in the flow. Catalog counts disagree between their own surfaces: the home page says 1,988 hand-picked startups, the meta description says 1,600+, and the sitemap holds 1,992 listing URLs alongside 246 city, 142 investor, 55 country and 19 category pages. The link finding has two parts. First, a seeded random sample of 90 of the 1,992 listing URLs, every one fetched successfully at 46-53 KB, parsed rather than pattern-matched, with each outbound anchor classified by hostname: all 90 carry rel="nofollow noopener" on the link to the listed company, and none carried a robots noindex. The sample returned Fiverr, Hootsuite, Drata, ChartMogul, AssemblyAI, Doist, Bending Spoons, Iconfinder and several YC companies, and the newest listings by sitemap lastmod are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, Cohere, ElevenLabs and Runway; we make no claim about how those entries were created, only that all of them are nofollow and that none is plausibly a £49 customer. Second, the ten newest entries on their own "fresh submissions" list on the home page: five carried a followed link, two carried nofollow and three were not listing pages. So a paid listing does appear to receive the followed link the page promises, and we say so. Every listing page also carries a constant block of thirteen sibling sites, tinystartups.com, domain-rating.com, startupspotlight.co, saas.fyi, buysellstartups.com, scrappystartups.com, topstartupideas.com, opensourcestartups.com, startupalternatives.com, startupsandfounders.com, curatetheinternet.com, tinystartupstudio.com and jaisal.co, all of them passing equity; the network is published openly in their own navbar. Sitemap lastmod is uniform at 8 September 2026 across all 1,992 listings and so carries no information about when any listing was created. Nothing behind the pay button was observed: no listing was purchased, so delivery, review and refund practice are outside what we can report. Submitator does not submit to Startups.fm. Our plans are $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, one-time, chosen by you in the dashboard with each Domain Rating shown and nofollow marked where it applies, rejections credited back as +1 directory and a 30-day refund policy on the conditions in our terms.
What changed, and why this page did
We wrote about Startups.fm in July as a directory with a free tier: put the badge on your homepage, get listed, and pay £49 only if you wanted the link followed. That page is now wrong in every particular, which is why you are reading a different one.
The badge route is gone. So is the badge page. The free listing is gone. What remains is a single price on a single form, and a notice explaining the reasoning: "Charging a fee keeps out spam and low-effort submissions, so every startup here is worth your time." It is a fair argument. It is also, on the evidence below, not what filled the directory.
The 1,988 did not pay £49
The number is the pitch. A board with 1,988 hand-picked startups sounds like somewhere worth £49 to stand. So we took ninety of them at random and looked at who they were.
Fiverr. Hootsuite. Drata. ChartMogul. AssemblyAI. Doist. Bending Spoons. Iconfinder. Several Y Combinator companies. The six most recently stamped entries in their sitemap are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, Cohere, ElevenLabs and Runway. These are not founders who found a directory and paid forty-nine pounds to be in it.
And every one of those ninety listings links out with rel="nofollow". That is the shape of a seeded catalog: built to have scale on day one, with the equity withheld from entries nobody bought.
Credit where it is due
We checked whether the thing you actually pay for arrives, because a page that only found the bad half would be worth nothing. Of the ten newest entries on their own fresh-submissions list, five carried a followed link and two did not. So a paying listing does appear to get the dofollow it was sold.
The price is stated before you pay, a person reviews the submission, the 48-hour turnaround is published, and the sibling network is declared openly in their own navigation rather than hidden. None of that is a scam. It is a real listing at a real price.
The problem is arithmetic.
£49 for one door
Forty-nine pounds is more than forty-nine dollars, at every exchange rate of the past decade. So the comparison is not close and does not depend on the day's rate: their £49 buys one listing, our $49 buys sixty directories, each one named in your dashboard with its Domain Rating on the card before you tick it.
That is about $0.82 a listing against £49 for one. And the sixty are yours to choose, so if a directory in the catalog is nofollow, we mark it as nofollow and you can decline it. Nobody hands you a board of Fiverr and Anthropic and calls it your peer group.
Should you ever pay it?
If Startups.fm specifically matters to you, if you have read the board and want to be on that particular page next to those particular names, £49 is the price and it is honestly advertised. Buy it knowing the link is one link.
What we would not do is buy it as an SEO decision. One followed link from a DR 49 domain is worth having and is not worth £49 when sixty listings cost $49, and the board's size, which is what makes the price feel reasonable, is not made of customers.
Their £49: one listing. Our $49: sixty directories.
One payment, every directory named in your dashboard with its Domain Rating on the card and nofollow marked where it applies, and you tick the ones you want before anything is filed.
Startups.fm review: the short answer
A real directory, an honest price tag and a followed link for the people who pay. Also £49 for one listing on a board whose 1,988 entries are mostly companies that never heard of it.
If the number on the homepage is what sold you, check who is in it first. We did, ninety at a time.
£49 for one. $49 for sixty.
Startups.fm removed its free badge route; listings are now £49 flat, reviewed in 48 hours, with a followed link on recent submissions. We sampled 90 of its 1,992 listings and got Fiverr, Hootsuite, Drata and Anthropic, every one nofollow and none of them paying customers. The whole catalog.
FAQ
Is Startups.fm free to submit to?
Not any more. It used to list you free if you put its badge on your homepage. That route is gone, the badge page now returns a 404, and their submit form states it flatly: “Listings are paid — £49 one-off.” There is no free tier and no badge alternative.
How much does Startups.fm cost?
£49 one-off for a single listing, which is more than $49 at any exchange rate you will see this decade. Submitator is $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100, one-time, and you pick every one of them yourself.
Does Startups.fm give a dofollow link?
For what you pay for, it appears to. Of the ten newest entries on their own “fresh submissions” list, five carried a followed link and two did not. What surprised us was the rest of the catalog: we drew 90 listings at random from the 1,992 in their sitemap and every single one was nofollow.
Who is actually listed on Startups.fm?
Largely companies that never submitted. Our random sample of 90 returned Fiverr, Hootsuite, Drata, ChartMogul, AssemblyAI, Doist, Bending Spoons and Iconfinder, and the newest entries by their sitemap are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, Cohere, ElevenLabs and Runway. None of those paid £49 to be there.
So what does the 1,988 number mean?
It means the directory is big, not that it is full of paying customers. Their homepage says 1,988 hand-picked startups, their meta description says 1,600+ and their sitemap holds 1,992 listing URLs. Whichever you take, the great majority are seeded entries carrying nofollow links, and the size is what makes the £49 look reasonable.
What is the Startups.fm network?
They publish it openly, which is to their credit. Their navbar links Domain Rating and Tiny Startups, and every listing page carries a block of thirteen sibling sites, among them tinystartups.com, domain-rating.com, startupspotlight.co, saas.fyi and buysellstartups.com. On every page we checked, all thirteen of those links pass equity.
Is Startups.fm a scam?
No, and we are not going to say otherwise. A human reviews submissions, the listing is real and permanent, the price is stated before you pay and the paid link appears to be followed. It is an expensive product with an honestly stated price, sold on a catalog whose scale you did not build and cannot benefit from.
What is the cheaper alternative to Startups.fm?
Thirty directories for $29, or sixty for $49, one payment. Every one named in your dashboard with its Domain Rating on the card and nofollow marked where it applies, so you pick the list rather than paying per door. That is between $0.82 and $0.97 a listing against £49 for one.
More submit-to guides.
One listing for £49, or sixty for $49.
One payment, each directory named with its Domain Rating on the card before you choose it, nofollow marked where it applies, badges installed and kept live where one is wanted, and a rejection swapped for another directory.