How to Submit to Toolio, and Why You Should Read Both Plan Pages

Toolio pricing: two live pages that don't agree

The FAQ on /select-a-plan reads: "Listing a tool on Toolio.ai starts at $9.99 (Value Listing), with additional options at $59.99 (Priority Listing) and $269.99 (Premium Listing). All are one-time fees." The FAQ on /select-a-plan-new, in the same paragraph slot, reads: "Listing a tool on Toolio.ai starts at $9.99 (Basic Listing), with added SEO value at $39.99 (SEO value Listing) and $159.99 (Platinum Listing)." Different names, and the middle and top tiers differ by $20 and $110.

Waiting times diverge further. The first page puts the entry tier at "Up to 5 days." The second puts its entry tier at "Up to 90 days", printed directly above the button you press to pay for it. Both pages carried the same Webflow publish stamp when we read them, so this is not one page having gone stale while the other was updated. They are concurrent.

The dofollow promise, and the page that crosses it out

On /select-a-plan, under the heading "Supercharge Your SEO with Toolio.ai.", sits this: "Boost your website's visibility with Toolio.ai's dofollow links. This means more people will find you online, leading to increased organic traffic and digital growth." Nothing on that page attaches the promise to a tier, and that page has no feature matrix at all.

The matrix lives on the other page, the one with the pay buttons, and it has a row labeled "Do-follow link". Against the entry tier that row renders the same crossed-out icon the matrix uses for every other feature a tier doesn't include. So the page that markets the dofollow doesn't qualify it, and the page that takes the money says the cheapest tier doesn't get one.

Worth being careful about what that does and does not establish. Two different URLs disagree; we did not watch a single page change its mind, so we cannot tell you the entry tier "lost" anything. And we did not buy a listing, so what a paying customer actually receives is not something we observed.

What the links actually do

We read the raw HTML of the outbound link on 80 listing pages, spaced evenly through the 9,077 in their sitemap. Seventy-two carried rel='nofollow'. The other eight carried rel='dofollow', which is worth explaining: there is no such rel token in the specification, so a browser and a crawler treat it as no attribute at all, which leaves the link followed. It works, in other words, but by doing nothing rather than by saying something.

A second sample came out very differently. Of the 60 tools linked from the homepage, 23 were dofollow, 17 nofollow and 20 carried an empty rel attribute. So the ratio depends heavily on which corner of the site you sample, and the honest summary across all 140 pages we read is that roughly two in three were nofollow. There are no redirectors anywhere and, with one cluster of exceptions, no tracking parameters, which is cleaner plumbing than most directories at this price manage.

The caveat that governs all of it: nothing on a listing page says which tier bought it. No badge, no class, no data attribute, no flag in the structured data. A $9.99 entry, a $159.99 top tier and an editorially added listing are indistinguishable from outside, so none of those tallies can be pinned to what an entry-level buyer gets. What can be said is the pair of facts together: most of the sample is nofollow, and their own matrix excludes the do-follow row at the entry price.

Their Domain Rating, and the one Ahrefs reports

Ahrefs rates toolio.ai 36. FrogDR independently reports 36 as well. Toolio publishes higher figures and doesn't agree with itself: the /select-a-plan hero says "43 DR+", five other pages say "40 DR+", the body of two pages says "currently rated at 40 and rising", and a comparison table on their own /seo-resources page lists Toolio's row at 44 under a column headed DA. Every hero figure carries the label "According to Ahrefs".

FrogDR keeps a daily series, and for the trailing 180 days it runs between 34 and 39, peaking at 39 in February. It doesn't reach 40 on any day in that window, let alone 43. What we cannot tell you is whether the claims were accurate when they were written: the 43 first appears in archived copies from late 2024, and no third-party measurement from that period survives. One thing is genuinely worth saying in their favor: the two conflicting numbers on /select-a-plan sit more than five thousand characters apart, with the whole form between them, so a visitor is unlikely to meet both at once. Separately, DA and DR are different metrics from different vendors, so the 44 is not directly comparable to the rest.

The paperwork, and what the consent line covers

They do publish a refund promise, and it is specific. The same sentence sits on seven pages, both plan pages included: "If your tool isn't published due to our review process, you'll get a full refund. We also refund for Featured/sponsorships if they haven't started yet." What it doesn't cover is a slow listing, a listing later taken down, dissatisfaction, or a link that turns out nofollow. And it lives only in marketing copy: the terms page contains the word refund zero times across the three versions we checked, and /refund-policy, /refunds and /refund all 404.

There is a sharper wrinkle on the page you pay on. The trigger it names is your tool not being published after review, and the same page's FAQ says all tools are accepted and listed. Read together, the one condition that would earn a refund is the one that page says cannot happen. Across the thirty-three pages we captured there is also no company name, no person and no address anywhere, registration sits behind a privacy proxy, and contact is an address printed as text rather than a link, plus a chat widget.

The form's consent line is a single sentence covering three separate things: "I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and I consent to receive the weekly newsletter." It is presented as text rather than as a checkbox you tick, and it folds a marketing subscription in with the terms. That is a design choice worth noticing before you make it, particularly since the newsletter is also something they sell sponsorship in.

Is a $9.99 Toolio listing worth it?

As a cheap listing on a real, sizeable AI directory, it is defensible. Nine thousand listings, indexable pages with self-referential canonicals, no redirectors, almost no tracking parameters, payment handed off to Stripe rather than captured on their own page, and no countdown or fake discount anywhere on either plan page. If you want to be in a directory people browse, $9.99 is a small amount of money.

Set against that: two live plan pages that disagree about what you are buying and how long it takes, a dofollow promise on the page that markets and a crossed-out do-follow row on the page that charges, a published Domain Rating that Ahrefs does not support today, a refund promise that lives only in marketing copy and not in the terms, no entity named, and a consent line that bundles marketing email with the terms. If the link is why you were paying, read their matrix before you decide, and take the entry tier for the listing rather than the link.