Done-For-You Directory Submission

Who this service page is for

This page is the long answer to a short checkout question: should you pay SubmitLoop to submit your product to directories, or should you keep clicking forms yourself. It is written for founders, indie hackers, agencies, and in-house marketers who already know directories exist and now need an honest description of the done-for-you packs. If you wanted a weekly launch leaderboard, this is the wrong product. If you wanted a Domain Rating contract, this is the wrong product. If you wanted a robot to spray 2,000 URLs overnight, this is the wrong product.

You should read this if you are choosing between Light and Growth, if a client asked you what 'guaranteed' means before they wire $49, or if you already DIY from the public catalog and want to know what changes when a person takes the queue. You should also read this if a competitor tab is open and you are trying to map our SKUs onto theirs without mixing units. Light is 60 guaranteed easy-form directories for one site. Growth is 177 or more for one site, with a refund if we claim successes we cannot evidence. Those numbers are the product. Marketing adjectives are not.

Agencies can use this page as the brief they send a client instead of inventing a custom SLA. Founders can use it as the pre-purchase checklist. Operators who will never buy a pack can still use the catalog section, because the public table stays usable whether or not money changes hands. That last point is not a footnote. It is how we designed the business: the explorer is not a hostage page that goes blank until you pay.

If you only have five minutes, jump to the snapshot table, then to what guaranteed means, then to what we will not do. If you have a lunch hour, read the intake and mailbox sections before you pay, because incomplete profiles are how a one-week Light pack turns into a three-week stall that looks like our fault and is usually missing screenshots.

What you are actually buying

SubmitLoop sells two one-time packs. Light is $49 for 60 guaranteed directories, one site. Growth is $99 for 177 or more directories, one site, with proof-or-refund if claimed successes lack a run log plus screenshot or trace. Both packs are manual. A person completes each form. Software holds the queue and stores evidence. Software does not blast the internet unattended.

You are buying labor against a tagged pool, plus evidence that the labor happened. You are not buying an editor's publish button. You are not buying Ahrefs. You are not buying a G2 Leader badge, a Product Hunt feature, or a Chrome Web Store listing. Those objects live in the public catalog when they are directories or paid placements, and they stay extra when they cost money the pack does not cover.

The pack is scoped to one destination URL and one product identity. If you have a marketing site and an app subdomain and a docs site, pick the canonical URL the directories should list. If you have two products, buy two packs. Sharing one Light order across three client brands is how credentials leak and reports become fiction.

Live pricing and the current pack copy sit on pricing. If this article and checkout ever disagree, checkout wins. We wrote this page to explain the SKUs, not to freeze a coupon.

Snapshot: Light, Growth, and DIY

Sticker price is the easy column. The useful columns are pool, proof, refund, sites, and whether you can still browse after you buy. Use this table as a briefing, then read the sections that unpack each row.

Light works out to about $0.82 per directory in the guaranteed pool. Growth works out to about $0.56. Those ratios only matter if the directories are real completable forms. A $0.20 URL that 404s is not a bargain. That is why the guaranteed tag exists: we train the pack against rows a person can finish with evidence, not against a scraped list of 4,000 dying indexes.

DIY is free of our invoice and never free of hours. If your fully loaded rate is $150 and a careful form takes 12 minutes including captcha and email verify, 60 directories cost 12 hours or $1,800 of founder time. Light at $49 is not a close contest on time. Growth at $99 versus 177 times 12 minutes is more than 35 hours. Buy the pack when you will not actually sit in those hours. Keep DIY when you enjoy forms, when you only want ten high-DR rows, or when the product page is still too thin for a stranger to classify.

Light: sixty guaranteed forms, one site, forty-nine dollars

Light is the entry pack. It exists so a seed-stage team can buy coverage without pretending they need a 177-row report they will never open. Sixty is large enough to feel like a campaign and small enough to QA on a Friday. If you will not open sixty rows, do not buy Growth to feel serious. Buy Light, review it, then decide.

The sixty are drawn from the guaranteed easy-form pool. Easy-form means we believe a person can complete the form with proof. It does not mean every editor publishes before lunch. It does not mean every listing is dofollow. It does not mean every site has Domain Rating 70. Sort the catalog yourself if you need those filters. The pack is a labor SKU against a tagged set, not a custom media plan.

One site means one product URL, one name, one logo kit, one verification mailbox. If you relaunch under a new domain mid-pack, tell us before workers keep submitting the old URL. If you add a German SKU with a different landing page, that is a second site. Light will not silently fork.

Start Light at signup for Light after you have a complete profile, or read pricing if you are still comparing Growth. Do not pay and then disappear for ten days. The clock we quote assumes you are reachable.

Growth: one hundred seventy-seven plus, proof or refund

Growth is the volume pack on the same guaranteed pool. $99 buys 177 or more directories for one site. The plus is not a license to invent URLs. It is a recognition that the live guaranteed set moves as we retag dead sites and add new easy forms. You should expect a large easy-form queue, not a surprise 400-row dump of paid review sites.

The clause that makes Growth different from Light is proof-or-refund. If we claim successes and cannot produce a run log plus a screenshot or a trace for each of those claimed successes, you get a full refund. That sentence is narrow on purpose. Editorial rejection after a completed form is not a refund. Ahrefs not recrawling is not a refund. You changing the product name on day four is not a refund. Missing evidence on claimed wins is a refund.

Agencies pick Growth when a client wants a thick report and a contractual handle if the report is empty theater. Founders pick Growth when they already survived Light, or when they know they will not DIY 177 forms and they want one invoice. Do not pick Growth because a blog said more directories always win. More unreviewed rows are how you get a PDF you never read.

Start Growth at signup for Growth. If you are unsure, Light is the correct default. You can buy Growth later on the same site; say so in intake so we can skip already-listed rows from the first pack.

The one-site rule is not a gotcha

Directory accounts, verification emails, and listing URLs are per product. Mixing two brands in one pack produces listings that name the wrong company, screenshots that confuse QA, and logins that neither client should hold. We scope one site because the work is identity work, not a generic URL spray.

White-label agencies sometimes want one invoice for five clients. That is a billing preference, not an operations design. Buy five Lights or five Growths. Keep five mailboxes. Keep five vaults. The $49 price exists so that structure is affordable. Collapsing it to save four checkouts is how you send Client A's screenshot to Client B.

A product with a web app and a Chrome extension is still usually one site if the canonical marketing URL is the same and directories should list that URL. If the extension has its own store listing process, that store is not in the pack. App stores are not twelve-minute forms. Treat them as a roadmap item, then come back to directories.

If you sell on two domains (a .io and a .com) pick one. Duplicate listings across two URLs for the same product waste the queue and confuse entity matching later. Canonicalize first. Submit second.

What guaranteed means as an operations word

Guaranteed on SubmitLoop is a pool tag. It marks directories where the form is completable by a person with a normal product kit: logo, descriptions, URL, email, sometimes a screenshot, sometimes a simple account. The tag is how we stop packing Light with $59 paywalls that appear after you fill twelve fields. It is how we stop packing Growth with invisible reCAPTCHAs that eat a night and produce no evidence.

The worker can complete the form with proof. That is the promise underneath the word. Proof means a run log plus a screenshot or a trace showing the form was submitted or the confirmation state we classify as success. If the directory then sits in moderation for two weeks, the form was still completed. The listing is not yet live. Those are different states. We will mark them differently when we can see them. We will not relabel pending as live to make a report look greener.

Guaranteed is also a training set. We retag when a site dies, when a free plan vanishes, when a captcha wall appears that we cannot honestly call easy. A tag can go stale. If a guaranteed row has become a paywall, the skip reason should say so. A high skip rate on guaranteed is a catalog bug we should fix, not a cue for you to invent a Domain Rating complaint.

Read the guaranteed chip on the public catalog before you buy if you are the kind of buyer who wants to see the pool. Filter it. Sort Domain Rating. Open five detail pages. That inspection is allowed and encouraged. The pack is not a mystery box of random URLs. It is labor against a set you can browse.

Guaranteed does not mean instant publish

Most directories moderate. Some auto-publish. Some email you in three days. Some never email and then go live on a Tuesday. None of that is under a submission vendor's control unless the vendor owns the directory. We do not own the third-party indexes we submit to. We cannot promise that an editor who volunteers on weekends will publish your AI copilot before your Product Hunt slot.

A success in our world is: form accepted, email confirmed when the directory required it, evidence stored. The Visit link in a report may appear later. Plan your homepage 'Featured on' strip for when the live URL exists, not for when the worker hits submit. If you promised a board '60 live backlinks in seven days', you promised a fantasy. Promise '60 evidenced form completes in the Light window, live URLs as editors allow'. That sentence is how you stay employed.

Instant publish is a property of a specific site, not a pack feature. If you only want auto-publish indexes, DIY those rows from the catalog and skip a pack. If you want coverage that includes moderated high-DR lists, accept the lag. Moderated lists are often the ones worth waiting for.

We will not fake a live URL by screenshotting a thank-you page and calling it a listing. A thank-you page is evidence of submit. A listing URL is evidence of publish. Both can appear in a good report. They are not interchangeable.

Guaranteed does not mean a Domain Rating number

Ahrefs Domain Rating moves when referring domains index and when Ahrefs recrawls. Moz Domain Authority is a different graph. Google uses neither number. We refuse numeric DR guarantees. Light will not move you from DR 0 to DR 10 on a calendar we invent. Growth will not either. Anyone who sells 'DR 0 to 10+ in 48 hours' is selling a screenshot of a tool, not a law of the web.

Directories can contribute referring domains. Some will be dofollow. Some will be nofollow. Some will never get crawled. Some will be noindexed. Packs that brag about URL count without domain count are selling a metric you will not see in Site Explorer. Count unique root domains in the report. Three subpages on the same index are one referring domain.

If your actual goal is a DR screenshot for a tweet, say so and buy the smallest pack you will QA, then wait six weeks before you screenshot. If the tweet cannot wait, you are buying a tweet, not SEO. Maybe that is worth $49. It is not worth lying to a customer about Google.

We sort the public catalog by DR descending because operators use it as a prioritization hack. That is not a promise that submitting to DR 70 sites raises your DR by a known amount. Relevance, indexation, and the rest of your link graph still exist. Directories are one campaign. They are not a substitute for a product people mention.

The easy-form pool in practice

Easy-form is a friction rating, not a quality insult. A DR 80 directory can be easy if the form is a name, URL, email, and description. A DR 12 directory can be hard if it demands a VAT number, a recorded demo, and a $199 featured upsell before submit. The pack prefers completable. You still choose quality when you DIY the public table.

Typical easy-form pattern: public submit URL, guest or simple account, no payment step, captcha that a person can solve, confirmation we can classify. Typical exclusion from guaranteed: paid-only walls, partner sales calls, app-store review queues, 'apply to be listed' editorial pitches with no form, dead tabs, Cloudflare loops that never show a form.

Login walls are a gray zone. A Google sign-in plus email verify is still a form a person can complete. It is slower. Growth has more room for that slower work because the queue is larger. Light stays biased toward the easier slice so a week is a realistic labor estimate. If a high-DR login wall sits outside Light's sixty, DIY it or wait for Growth. Do not demand we burn half of Light on one OAuth maze.

Math captchas, checkbox captchas, and email codes are normal. They are why bots fail and why the pack costs money. They are not a reason to skip a relevant site. They are a reason the work is manual.

How the guaranteed tag is maintained

Workers and the submit engine leave notes: site up, form completed, paywall, unreachable, already listed, category mismatch. Those notes feed retags. A directory that was free in January can be paid-only in March. The public catalog should show pricing_type and site_status when we know them. The guaranteed chip should not keep advertising a corpse.

You help when you send a skip that looks wrong. If we skipped a row you know is a simple guest form, say so. If we marked success and the live URL 404s, say so. The catalog is a living operations object, not a static ebook. Treating it like a PDF from 2019 is how the whole industry shipped dead lists.

We will not keep a guaranteed tag to protect a marketing number. Losing a tag is cheaper than refunding Growth because we claimed a success we could not evidence. Align incentives that way and the word guaranteed stays meaningful.

If you DIY, you can ignore the tag and sort by DR and dofollow. The tag is for pack targeting and for operators who want the same pool the workers use. It is a filter, not a moral ranking of directories.

Timeline: Light is about a week after a complete profile

Most Light packs finish in about a week once the product profile is complete. Complete means the URL resolves, copy is not lorem, logo and screenshots exist, categories are chosen, and a mailbox can receive verification messages. Incomplete logos, placeholder descriptions, or a site still behind basic auth will delay any vendor. That delay is on the profile, not on the SKU.

A week is a labor estimate, not an editor estimate. Some listings will be live during that week. Some will be pending. The report you get at the end of labor is a submit report with evidence. It is not a promise that Ahrefs has recrawled. If you need live URLs for a launch collage, start Light more than a week before the launch, and DIY the auto-publish rows in parallel.

Weekend intake on Friday night with missing screenshots is how people experience 'they were slow'. Send the kit Monday morning. Watch the verification inbox twice a day for the first week. Do not start a second overlapping pack until you have the first target list, or you will double-submit the same twenty sites.

If a directory requires a back-and-forth that you must answer (a human editor asking for a tax ID), that thread is on you. We will flag it. We cannot invent a local entity.

Timeline: Growth is longer because the queue is larger

177 forms are 177 forms. Captchas, logins, and email verifies do not parallelize into 48 hours without either lying or using bots we refuse. Growth takes longer than Light. Plan two to three weeks of labor after a complete profile as a sane expectation, with live URLs continuing to appear after that as editors work.

SubmitSaaS advertises 48 hours on some pages. That is a different claim and a different product. We will not match a 48-hour 140-row promise by lowering evidence quality. Speed is not our primary claim. Proof is. Read vs SubmitSaaS if speed is the only axis you care about, then come back if you still want screenshots.

During a Growth run, silence in your inbox except for verification mail is normal. Manual work is quiet until the report. Do not start a blog redesign in week two because you are anxious the pack is silent. Do whitelist verification mail. Do answer worker questions the same day.

If you have a hard external deadline (a conference, a fundraise screenshot), buy Light for the week you have, not Growth for a fantasy of 177 live links by Friday. Sequence volume after the date, not through it.

What a complete profile actually contains

Name is the public listing title. If you operate as Acme internally and AcmeHQ on the domain, pick the domain-facing name. URL must resolve, return a real page, and not bounce through a parked domain. Tagline is the one line next to your logo in a grid, not a slogan contest. Short description is the hover state of the company. Long description is the body when someone opens a profile. Pricing is a trust field. 'Contact us' is allowed. Lying about a free plan you disabled is not. Categories are taxonomy. Screenshots are proof you exist. Logo is the favicon of your reputation.

Two screenshots beat zero. A pricing page screenshot beats a blurry laptop photo. A square logo on a transparent or simple background beats a wordmark that vanishes on dark directory themes. If you only have a favicon, export a 512 pixel version. Workers cannot upscale a 16 pixel icon into a listing image that passes validation.

Write a directory-specific short description that classifies the product for a librarian: who it is for, what it does, what category it belongs in. Ad copy that says 'reimagine synergy' will get categorized as junk or rejected. Marketplaces need both sides named (buyers and sellers). Horizontal infra needs one repeated category, not a random walk through every dropdown.

If the marketing site is a single hero and an email box, fix the destination before you buy. Packs cannot invent a product page. Directories that ask for features, pricing, and desktop screenshots will bounce a thin page. That bounce is not a vendor failure.

Intake: the first day after you pay

After payment, expect a profile intake: URL, descriptions, assets, categories, and an email that can receive verification messages. Fill it the same day. Missing screenshots are the number one stall. The second is a mailbox nobody watches. The third is a URL that still says coming soon.

1. Pay and open intake immediately. Do not 'get to it next week'.
2. Upload logo and at least two screenshots in the formats the form accepts.
3. Paste short and long descriptions you would allow a stranger to publish.
4. Set the verification mailbox and confirm you can log into it.
5. List languages and countries you actually support.
6. Attach any prior submission report so we can skip already-listed domains.
7. Name the canonical URL and the one product identity for this pack.
8. Tell us if login walls are in scope or if you want the easiest slice only.

If intake is a shared Google Drive dump with files named IMG_4032, you will get slower work. Name files logo.png, screenshot-dashboard.png, screenshot-pricing.png. Humans still have to find things.

Intake is also where you declare hard skips: no gambling directories, no directories that require a phone call, no country you cannot serve. We cannot honor a constraint you did not write down. Put it in the profile, not in a tweet after the report.

The verification mailbox is part of the product

Many directories create an account and email a confirm link. If nobody clicks that link, the listing never exists. The mailbox on the business profile is the identity we use for signup and for IMAP-style confirmation when we can poll it. If you give us a noreply address, you have bought a stall.

Use a dedicated mailbox per product when you can: directories@yourdomain or a plus-address you control. Do not use a personal Gmail you share with five tools and then rotate the password mid-pack. Do not use an agency shared inbox where verification mail looks like spam and gets archived.

Whitelist vendor mail and directory mail. Watch the inbox twice a day for the first week of Light and for the first two weeks of Growth. If a confirm link expires in 24 hours, a founder on a flight with no laptop can burn a slot. Forwarding to Slack is fine if someone is on point. Forwarding to a black hole is not.

We will not use a stolen mailbox, a temporary inbox that dies in an hour, or a teammate's personal account 'just this once' if that person leaves the company next month. Credentials are a security responsibility. Directory accounts get dumped. Store them in a vault. Change anything that matches your Google password.

How email confirmation actually runs

The happy path: worker submits, directory emails a link, we or you confirm, listing enters moderation or goes live. The messy path: the email lands in spam, the link is a one-time token, the directory also wants a password set, the confirm page asks for a captcha. Manual work exists for the messy path.

If we can poll the mailbox, we will try to confirm without pinging you for every link. If we cannot poll it, you are on the critical path. Say in intake whether we have IMAP access. Do not assume. A mailbox you 'will check' and then ignore is the most common Growth delay after missing assets.

Some directories verify by sending a code you type back into the form. Those codes are time-boxed. A worker waiting on you at 16:00 cannot hold a tab open until 22:00. Same-day replies matter more than polite weekly recaps.

We will not click phishing lookalikes. If a 'directory' emails a wallet connect or a wire instruction, that is not verification. Tell us. We will skip and retag.

Already-listed skips are a feature

If your product is already live on a directory, submitting again is usually a duplicate, a reject, or an edit of an old profile you no longer control. We skip already-listed rows when we can see them. Bring last year's report, a spreadsheet of domains, or a note in intake. The pack is a queue, not a legal exclusive that erases history.

Already listed is not a failed pack. It is a saved slot. Depending on how the run is counted, a skip may be replaced with another guaranteed row or recorded as coverage you already had. Ask in intake if you care about net-new count versus 'touched 60'. Light is 60 guaranteed attempts in the pool, with skips explained. It is not '60 new live URLs even if you were already everywhere'.

Founders who bought a LaunchDirectories pack last year and now want SubmitLoop should paste that domain list. Founders who DIY'd twenty high-DR rows should say which twenty. Pride about 'we already did directories' without a list helps nobody. The worker cannot read your memory.

If you are already listed but the profile is stale (old logo, dead URL), say you want an update pass. That is a different motion than a new submit. Some directories allow edits. Some do not. We will not invent an edit UI that does not exist.

Paid directories stay public and stay extra

Every paid row in the SubmitLoop catalog stays public. We do not hide fees behind an email gate to force a lead. The gate, when it exists, is for surplus free directories. Paid placements are where people get burned by surprise invoices, so they should be visible while you are still window shopping.

Light and Growth target the guaranteed free and easy pool. They do not buy you a Product Hunt ad, a Forbes slot, a G2 Leader campaign, or a $499 featured listing on a software index. Those are ads with a backlink attached. Treat them like ads. Cap spend. Prefer clear referral traffic or a DR you would actually pay for a la carte.

If a worker hits a paywall mid-form, the skip reason should say paid, with a price when we saw one. We will not put your card into a directory checkout unless you separately asked to buy that placement. Packs that quietly include 'select partner paid launches' can be real value or fluff. Ours do not pretend to include them. You choose paid rows yourself from the table.

Use the public Paid filter, then buy those checkouts on your own timeline. The pack already spent $49 or $99. Paid is extra by definition. Mixing 'pack included' with 'you still pay the directory' is how invoices surprise you at other vendors. Here the rule is simple: pack is free-and-easy labor. Paid is your media budget.

What we will not do: bots

We will not run unattended bot blasts against directory forms. Directories in 2026 have Cloudflare, account sign-up, OAuth, IMAP verification, and math captchas. Auto-submit tools die on that stack. The ones that 'succeed' often succeed by skipping everything hard and reporting URL count as success.

We use software for queues, field mapping, evidence folders, and confirmation classification. That is operations software. It is not a license to ignore robots.txt and hammer a form 200 times. A person still chooses the free path, still solves the captcha, still stops at a paywall.

If you wanted a $19 lifetime deal that 'submits to 5,000 directories', you wanted a different industry, the one that burned directory SEO's reputation. We will not compete with that price. We will not ship that method. If a sales chat from anyone including a freelancer promises 5,000 submissions this week, ask for ten live URLs from last week's clients. Then leave.

Headless browsers get blocked. We do not sell a headless pack. Manual and headed exist because bot-walls exist. That constraint is the product.

What we will not do: Domain Rating promises

We will not write 'guaranteed DR 10+' into a checkout. We will not screenshot a competitor's DR claim and match it. DR is a third-party estimate on a delay. Your graph includes more than directories. Promising a number is how vendors train buyers to chargeback when Ahrefs is slow.

We will show DR on directory rows so you can prioritize. We will not show a fake before/after of your domain as a pack deliverable. If you want to track DR, open Ahrefs yourself in six weeks and write the number in your own sheet. That habit is more honest than a vendor PDF with a hockey stick.

SubmitSaaS markets guaranteed DR jumps on some plans. ListingBott-style products sometimes sell DR-or-refund at much higher prices. Those are different buyers. If you need a contractual DR floor, read those terms, not ours. We would rather lose that keyword than lie.

If a salesperson (ours or anyone's) tells you Light moves DR from 0 to 10, they are off-script. This page is the script.

What we will not do: buy you a G2 Leader badge

G2, Capterra, GetApp, and similar review platforms are often paid, review-gated, or sales-assisted. A Leader badge is a marketing program with rules, spend, and review volume. It is not a twelve-minute directory form in the guaranteed pool. We will not buy it as part of $49 or $99.

Named-brand directories appear in the public catalog when we track them, with pricing visible. You can buy those yourself. TinyLaunch and other launch toolkits sometimes mix brand-name targets into a higher-priced pack. That can be worth it if those names match your list. Read their current list. Do not assume SubmitLoop Growth is a cheaper G2. It is not.

We will not submit fake reviews. We will not seed five-star text. We will not create employee accounts to vote. If a directory is actually a review site that requires customers, the skip reason should say so. Your customers can review you. Our workers should not.

Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons, GitHub Marketplace featured, and Reddit ads look like high DR because the parent domains are high DR. Listing there is an app-store or ads process. Do not expect Light to ship a store listing. Use those rows as a reminder for the product roadmap.

Manual humans, and the software around them

A person fills each form. That is the sentence to repeat to a client who thinks AI agents already solved directories. Agents help with queues and with mapping labels to product fields. Agents still lose to Cloudflare and to 'pick a plan' walls that only a human can refuse. The human's job is to take the free path, stop at paid, store proof, and write a skip reason that a stranger can understand.

Software stores result.json, page text, and screenshots in an evidence directory per run. That is how Growth's refund is checkable. 'The intern submitted' is not checkable. 'Here is the file' is checkable. We built the packs around files.

You will not get a livestream of every form unless we explicitly offer a follow-along session. You will get a report with evidence. If you are an agency that needs to watch, say so; visibility is a process, not a secret extra SKU on the public page. Default is async labor plus files.

Humans make mistakes. The antidote is evidence and a skip taxonomy, not a claim of 100 percent perfection. If a screenshot shows a captcha, that is not success. If a screenshot shows a thank-you page, that is submit success. If the live URL 404s later, that is a later state. QA ten random rows when the report lands.

The public catalog stays DIY-able

You can browse paid rows and top free directories without buying Light or Growth. Filters cover DR, DA, traffic, dofollow versus nofollow, pricing, language, country, and the guaranteed tag. Surplus free directories may unlock with email. Paid rows do not wait on that gate.

DIY the catalog when you only need ten high-DR rows, when you enjoy forms, when the product is awkward and you want to pick categories by hand, or when you already have a vendor for volume and just need our table. Buy a pack when the remaining queue is guaranteed easy forms and your hourly rate exceeds pack pricing, or when you need screenshot proof for a client.

The catalog after you buy is the same catalog. We do not revoke filters because you paid. Use it to find gaps the pack did not cover: language, paid, or high-DR login walls you want to DIY. Use it next quarter when directories die and new ones appear.

CSV and explorer workflows exist so you can keep a sheet. The pack report is not the only system of record. Your sheet with live URL, date, link type, and UTM is how you talk to a co-founder without lying. 'We submitted 60' is not a status. '41 live, 11 pending, 8 skipped' is a status.

How to use the catalog the week before you pay

Filter Guaranteed. Sort DR descending. Note which high-DR rows are Custom price. Those are not pack food. Filter Dofollow if SEO is the goal. Filter Free if cash is the goal. Open five directory detail pages. DIY those five or decide the friction is why you are buying.

Time the next five directory forms you do yourself. Include minutes waiting on email verify. Average them. Multiply by 60. That is Light in founder hours. Multiply by 177. That is Growth in founder hours. Compare to $49 and $99. If your average is four minutes because you only hit dead-simple forms, DIY a guaranteed-style pool and buy nothing. If your average is eighteen minutes because everything needs Google login, buy the pack.

Price the five paid directories you actually want. If they exceed $300 total, cut three. Do this before checkout so you do not 'add just one featured' in a panic after Light starts.

If day one's DIY already produced two live URLs, you are not behind. You are ahead of anyone still reading listicles. The pack is optional acceleration.

Proof: run log, screenshot, and trace

Every claimed success should have operational evidence: a run log plus a screenshot or a trace that the form was completed. The log says what happened in time. The screenshot shows the confirmation state a human can see. A trace is the technical sibling when a screenshot is not the right artifact (a redirect chain, a stored result payload). Growth refunds if claimed successes lack that pair.

A screenshot of a captcha is not success. A screenshot of a homepage with no product mention is not a listing. A screenshot of a paywall is a skip. Train your eye before you forward the report to a client. Ten random rows. Click live URLs. If it 404s, it is not live.

We do not sell a credential dump as the core deliverable. Some vendors email CSV passwords. Credentials are useful when a directory created an account you must keep. They are also a security responsibility. If we created an account, store it in a vault. Rotate anything reused. Do not paste passwords into the tracking spreadsheet.

Agencies should decide what the client considers proof. Some clients want the live URL or nothing. Some accept a thank-you page screenshot. Some want the email confirmation thread. Match the pack to that bar. Growth's refund is for missing log-plus-screenshot-or-trace on claimed successes, not for a client who redefined success as 'indexed in Ahrefs this week'.

Growth refund mechanics, and what is not a refund

If we claim successes but cannot produce log plus screenshot or trace for each of those successes, you get a full refund. That is the Growth clause. File the question when the report lands, not three months later after you lost the files. Keep the evidence folder.

Not a refund: editor sat on a queue for two weeks. Not a refund: Ahrefs has not recrawled. Not a refund: you changed the logo and want a redo of 177 rows. Not a refund: you meant to buy a G2 campaign. Not a refund: a nofollow listing you did not read as nofollow. Not a refund: already-listed skips you asked us to honor.

Light is not marketed as the same proof-or-refund SKU. Still ask for missing screenshots. The culture you want is 'here is the file'. If Light is missing a few in a 60-queue, we should produce them or explain the skip. Do not confuse a support fix with a Growth contractual refund.

Chargebacks because DR did not go up, after a worker spent a week on forms, are how you get banned from processors. If you wanted a different vendor's report style, ask to make the proof usable before you punch the nuclear button. Read pricing before you pay so the clause is not a surprise.

Brief comparison: BacklinkBot

BacklinkBot is a volume pack brand. Public pages have started around $99 for 100+ listings, with larger Elite-style counts (including 300+) for buyers who want a blast. SubmitLoop Light is $49 for 60 guaranteed. Growth is $99 for 177+. On sticker math, BacklinkBot Starter can look like about $0.99 each at $99 per 100+, while Light is about $0.82 and Growth about $0.56. Compare proof and refunds, not only the count.

We do not sell a 300-directory blast. If you specifically want maximum raw count, BacklinkBot Elite is built for that shape. We optimize for a guaranteed easy-form pool plus evidence. A 300-row report you will not QA is theater. A 60-row report you will open is a campaign.

BacklinkBot advertises a detailed submission report. We store a run log plus screenshot or trace per claimed success, and Growth refunds if we cannot produce that proof for claimed successes. Ask both vendors for a sample row, not a marketing adjective.

Full side-by-side: vs BacklinkBot. Use that page when volume packs are the tab you already opened. Use this page when you are trying to understand SubmitLoop's service in isolation.

Brief comparison: LaunchDirectories

LaunchDirectories popularized a clean public list plus a manual submission SKU. Public packs often look like $99 for 30+, $149 for 60+, and $199 for 100+ (some landing pages show a higher ladder, so check live checkout). They emphasize 100 percent manual submission, a product-tailored list, 3-6 day delivery on many pages, and a report with live links, screenshots, and credentials.

SubmitLoop starts lower ($49 / 60 guaranteed), sells a larger Growth queue at $99, and puts a refund behind missing proof rather than behind a Domain Rating number. Their 30+ is a coverage target for a tailored list. Our 60 is a guaranteed easy-form pool. Those are different units. Do not mash them into 'who has more directories'.

If you need a short high-touch list chosen around a niche (a dentist SaaS that should not be forced through 40 AI-only indexes), their tailoring pitch may fit. If you need a larger easy pool plus a catalog you will keep using, we fit. Many teams do both over two quarters. Deduplicate on domain before you pay twice.

Full side-by-side: vs LaunchDirectories. Some of their plan pages mention paid launches on select partner directories. Ours do not bundle those. Paid stays public and extra here.

Brief comparison: SubmitSaaS

SubmitSaaS sells listing packs in a 60 to 140+ range starting near $60, with a 48-hour turnaround advertised on some pages and DR-gain claims on some plans. Light is $49 for 60 guaranteed with log plus screenshot proof. We do not make a DR-number promise. We do not claim 48 hours for 177 forms.

Paid directories are typically not included on their packs either. Our paid rows stay public so you can budget them separately. The honest fork is speed-and-DR-marketing versus proof-and-pool-tagging. If 48 hours is a hard constraint and you accept their DR language, read their terms. If you want evidence files and a week-scale Light estimate, stay here.

Faster is not better if the artifact is a spreadsheet of URLs that 404. Ask for screenshots. Ask what happens when an editor rejects. Ask whether already-listed is counted as success.

Full side-by-side: vs SubmitSaaS.

Brief comparison: TinyLaunch

TinyLaunch is a broader launch toolkit. Directory submission is an add-on, historically around $179 for about 60 directories and about $279 for about 110 (roughly $2.50 each at the high end). Light is $49 for 60 (~$0.82). Compare the submission SKU, not the whole TinyLaunch suite, unless you also need their other launch tools.

Higher price can include brand-name targets in the mix. That only matters if those names are sites you would pay for anyway and if they are actually in the current list. G2, SourceForge, and similar properties are often paid or editorial. We keep those rows public. We submit them only when they sit in the guaranteed pool and the form is completable without a paid upgrade we do not sell.

Many teams use TinyLaunch for launches and SubmitLoop for directories. Do not double-pay two DFY directory packs for the same week unless you want overlapping coverage. Export both target lists and dedupe.

Full side-by-side: vs TinyLaunch.

When to DIY, when to buy Light, when to buy Growth

DIY if you have under fifteen high-priority directories, if you like forms, if the product category is awkward and you need to think on every dropdown, or if the landing page is still being rewritten. Buying a pack to submit a coming-soon page wastes money and burns first impressions on indexes that remember you.

Buy Light if $49 is the budget, if you want sixty guaranteed forms with evidence, if you will actually open the report, or if you need a first proof folder before you scale. Buy Light if a launch is in two weeks and you need the easy pool moving now, not a 177-row project.

Buy Growth if you already trust the pool, if a client wants thickness plus a refund handle on missing proof, or if you have timed founder hours and know 177 forms will not happen. Do not buy Growth out of spite after a thin report from another vendor. Spite is not a budget line. Write one specific complaint about the old report, then buy the SKU that fixes that complaint.

Stack DIY and pack: you take Tier 1 high-DR dofollow rows you care about, we take the guaranteed remainder. Say so in intake. Otherwise we may submit a site you wanted to control, or skip one you wanted included.

Founder hourly math without the TED talk

Take your fully loaded hourly rate. Include the cost of context switching, not just salary divided by 2,000. Directory forms destroy maker time because they are interrupt-shaped: wait for email, solve captcha, find a screenshot, wait again. Twelve minutes average is optimistic for login walls. Twenty is common.

Sixty times twenty minutes is twenty hours. At $100 per hour that is $2,000 of time against a $49 invoice. At $250 per hour it is $5,000 of time. The pack is cheap. Your denial that you would have done the forms is the only reason DIY still happens, and sometimes denial is correct: you would have done ten and then stopped. Ten good listings can beat sixty ignored ones. Be honest about which person you are.

Growth at 177 times fifteen minutes is about forty-four hours. Nobody 'quickly knocks those out on a Sunday'. Sunday knocks out eight. Then you hate directories for a year. That hatred is how people call directories dead. Directories are not dead. Unfinished queues are unfinished.

If you are unemployed on a runway and forms are a way to feel progress, DIY. The catalog is for you. If you are shipping product, buy Light and go back to the product.

Agency workflow that does not lie to the client

Buy per product. Separate mailboxes. Separate vaults. Separate evidence folders. Overlap of directories across clients does not matter. Overlap of credentials does. Never share a directory login across clients.

Pass through the vendor price or show it as a line item. Markup your QA, copy, and reporting. Clients can Google SubmitLoop. A $2,000 'directory SEO' invoice that is a $49 pack with no QA is how you lose the retainer when they find this page.

Define success in the SOW: evidenced form completes in the pack window, live URLs as editors allow, paid directories extra. If the client demanded DR +10, either educate them with this page or decline. Do not launder a DR promise through our checkout.

When the report lands, you QA ten rows before the client sees it. You rewrite skip reasons into client language. You do not forward a raw dump with 'looks good'. That hour is the agency product.

A fourteen-day plan if you have not decided

1. Day 1: Freeze product copy. Short description, long description, pricing, categories. Export assets to a folder named directory-kit.
2. Day 2: Open pricing. Write Light and Growth in a note. Open competitor checkouts if those tabs are already open.
3. Day 3: Filter the public catalog to Guaranteed and to Dofollow. Screenshot the first twenty rows.
4. Day 4: Price five paid directories you might want. Cut until the paid budget is a number you remember.
5. Day 5: DIY three highest-DR free dofollow rows. Learn the form pain.
6. Day 6: Decide. If the forms felt cheap and you enjoyed them, keep DIY. If they felt like a tax, pick Light or Growth.
7. Day 7: If you buy, complete the profile before midnight. Light signup or Growth signup.
8. Days 8-12: Handle verification emails. Do not disappear.
9. Day 13: Spot-check proof. Request fixes.
10. Day 14: Update the homepage strip and one social post for whatever is actually live.

If day 5 already produced two live URLs, keep going or stop with pride. The pack is not a moral requirement.

Set a 25-minute timer on day 6. If you have not decided when it rings, default to Light if budget is tight, Growth if you already know you will not DIY volume, or DIY for two weeks if you like forms. Indecision is the expensive option because launch week keeps moving.

Four-week operator calendar after you buy

Week 1 is intake and first guaranteed forms. Your job is inbox and assets, not checking DR. Week 2 is the bulk of easy forms and the first wave of thank-you pages. For Light, week 2 may already be QA. For Growth, week 2 is still queue. Week 3 is stragglers: login walls, extra screenshots, category recodes. Week 4 is QA of the report, live URL logging, and one distribution pass.

Friday of week 4, mark each row: live, pending editor, rejected, already listed, skipped paywall. That taxonomy is how you talk without lying.

Do not start a second product's pack in week 2 of the first. Finish, QA, then clone the kit. Parallel packs with one founder watching one mailbox is how confirms expire.

On the last day, pick three live URLs for the homepage. Not thirty. Three you are proud to show. Add more as editors publish. A strip of broken badges is worse than no strip.

How to read a submission report without fooling yourself

Sample ten claimed successes at random. Open the public URL. A 404 is not a listing. A bare homepage with no product name is not a listing. Nofollow is acceptable when you wanted referral, not when you promised a DR slide. A screenshot of a captcha page is evidence of a stall, not of a submit.

Count unique root domains, not URLs. Packs that brag about URL count without domain count are selling you a metric you will not see in Site Explorer.

Read skip reasons. Skipped: paid $59 mid-form. Skipped: already listed, live URL attached. Skipped: category requires a mobile app binary. Skipped: country of incorporation required. Those are adult sentences. 'Could not submit' with no reason is how this industry got a reputation. Demand reasons.

If Growth is missing screenshots for claimed successes, that is a billing conversation. If Light is missing a few, ask for them. File immediately. Delayed QA is how files get lost and how refund windows get awkward.

Dofollow, nofollow, and the story you will tell later

When the KPI is referring domains Ahrefs may count, bias the queue toward dofollow. When the KPI is a human arriving from a huge community, a nofollow DR 90 can still be the right click. Reddit is the usual example. Do not delete distribution just to keep a spreadsheet looking pure.

The guaranteed pool mixes link types because the web mixes link types. Your job is to know the mix in the report. A pack that is 90 percent nofollow blogrolls is a brand pack, not an SEO pack. A pack that is 90 percent dofollow unknown DR 12 sites is a spam-risk pack. You want relevant, mixed, mostly indexable.

UTM the destination URL when the directory allows a custom URL, if you care about referral analytics. Many directories will not. Do not break the canonical URL with ugly query strings on sites that display the raw link as the listing. When in doubt, clean URL, track with referrer.

Read cluster posts on dofollow versus nofollow after this page if you need metric literacy. This page is the service contract in plain language.

Category fit is the silent killer

AI is not a category on a legal directory. Developer tools is not a category on a restaurant index. If your product is horizontal infra, pick the three categories you will repeat everywhere and stick to them. Randomizing categories to hit more lists produces rejects and weird crawl text.

Workers will use the categories you put in the profile. Garbage in is garbage listed. If you sell a marketplace, write a blurb that names both sides. If you sell a Chrome extension with a thin marketing site, expect rejects until the page has a features section and screenshots.

Regulated claims (health, finance, 'guaranteed returns') will get you rejected or worse. Directories are public. Do not ask a worker to paste a claim your lawyer would not allow on the homepage.

If the category is awkward (hardware-adjacent IoT, nonprofit data, local services), a large guaranteed pool of SaaS indexes may be the wrong SKU. DIY a dozen relevant rows or pick a vendor that sells tailoring. Light can still help once you have a cloud SKU that is actually software.

Language, country, and who you can serve

English-only products should not burn a week on forms that require a local business registration number. Tell us your languages. Filter country in the catalog when you DIY. A US AI copilot listed on a general web directory in a language you cannot support rarely converts and often fails category checks.

We cannot honorably translate your category into a regulated claim in German. If you are expanding to DE or FR, write localized short descriptions before you expect those directories to be in scope. A pack is not a translation agency.

Country of incorporation fields are skip reasons when you have no entity. Do not invent a VAT number. That is fraud. Skip is cheaper.

Climate-tech, government-adjacent, and education products hit eligibility walls. Put constraints in intake. Workers are not mind readers.

Login walls, captchas, and Cloudflare

Login walls are not a reason to skip a high-DR site if the product fits. They are a reason the pack costs money. If you DIY, budget extra time for Google login plus TOTP. If a vendor cannot complete login walls, their 100+ is an easy-form 100+, which is the same idea as our guaranteed tag. Ask them. We tag it.

Captchas are why bots fail. People solve them. That is the work. If a captcha is invisible and infinite, we skip and retag. We will not sit in a loop overnight to protect a guaranteed label.

Cloudflare and bot-walls block headless automation. That is why we do not sell a headless blast. If your own DIY uses a datacenter IP and gets blocked, try a normal browser. The pack already does.

OAuth with Google can require a Google account we control or you control. Put the account in intake. Do not wait until row 40.

Credentials hygiene after accounts exist

Store directory logins in a password manager vault per product. Never in the tracking spreadsheet. Never in Slack. Directory databases leak. Reused passwords become a company incident.

If a vendor emails you a CSV of passwords, rotate anything that matches a real account. That advice applies to every DFY provider, including us if we ever have to send a one-off. Prefer a vault share.

When an employee leaves, rotate the verification mailbox and the vault. Listings persist. Access should not.

Do not use the CEO's personal Google account as the identity for 177 directories. That account will be a hostage when the CEO is on parental leave.

Common mistakes when people buy directory packs

• Treating 60 guaranteed as 60 live dofollow backlinks on day seven.
• Buying Growth to look serious, then never opening the report.
• Sending lorem copy and blaming the vendor for rejects.
• Using a mailbox nobody watches.
• Expecting G2 Leader, Product Hunt, or app-store listings inside $49.
• Double-paying two DFY vendors the same week without deduping domains.
• Promising a board a DR number we refused to promise you.
• Starting intake on a coming-soon page.
• Sharing one pack across two products.
• Calling already-listed skips a failure.
• Paying low-DR featured upsells in a panic mid-form.
• Chargebacking because Ahrefs is slow.
• Ignoring skip reasons and asking 'why so few'.
• Putting passwords in the client Google Sheet.
• Buying a 300-row blast you will not QA, then calling directories dead.

If this list feels like we have been on the other side of those tickets, we have. The pack works when the profile is real and the expectations match this page.

If the checklist for deciding feels heavier than just buying Light, buy Light. Decision fatigue is how founders do zero directories and then write a tweet that directories do not work.

After listings go live: distribution, not more forms

The day a high-DR listing publishes, add it to a homepage strip if you are proud of the badge. Post once on LinkedIn or X. Do not schedule twenty posts. One human post helps crawlers and people. Spam posting 'we are listed on...' twenty times is how you look like an SEO agency from 2011.

Log live URL, date, link type, and UTM in your sheet. Revisit monthly. Directories die, change to paid, or drop DR. A quarterly thirty-minute pass beats an annual panic.

Do not immediately buy another pack because you feel momentum. QA the first. Fill gaps from the catalog. Paid rows you actually want are the next budget line, not another 177 easy forms you will ignore.

If nothing indexed in six weeks, look at noindex, robots, thin page, and whether the listings are actually live. Then look at whether you only landed on nofollow blogrolls. Then look at the rest of your link graph. Directories are not a full SEO program.

Seasonality and calendar honesty

Editors vanish in late December. Verification email gets buried under holiday newsletters. If you need listings before a January launch, buy in early December or wait until the second week of January. This calendar advice is free and worth more than a ten percent coupon. We do not control directory staff PTO.

Product Hunt week is a bad week to disappear from the verification inbox. If you launch on PH, either start Light two weeks earlier or accept that confirms will wait until you sleep again.

Do not start a 177-queue on December 23. Do not start one the day you fly to a conference with no laptop. The mailbox is the product.

End of quarter 'we need backlinks' panic produces the worst profiles. Write copy on a calm day, then buy.

What directories can and cannot do for AI citations

Listings on established directories can show up as crawlable mentions. That sometimes helps assistants that quote the open web. It is not an AI citation product. Anyone selling 'we will get you into ChatGPT' via directories is stretching.

What you can do: consistent name, consistent URL, consistent one-line description, so entity matching is easy. What you cannot do: force a model to recommend you. Treat directories as public structured mentions. Pair them with docs, changelog, and comparison pages on your own site that you actually control.

We will not add an AI-citation upsell to Growth to win a keyword. If that is the only reason you were looking at directory packs, keep the $49 and write three genuine integration pages instead.

If your product is itself an AI tool, AI directories are a category filter, not a magic citation engine. Use the AI chip in the catalog when you DIY. The pack still runs the guaranteed pool, which includes more than AI-only indexes.

Scenarios: who buys what

An AI writing tool with DR 0 and a Product Hunt launch next month needed referring domains that could index before the launch post, not a six-week editorial tour. They chose Light for the guaranteed pool the same week they scheduled PH. What followed: a useful set of live or queued listings before PH day, and three live URLs on a collage. The lesson: sequence the fast easy pool before a tailored or giant pack if your calendar is a launch date.

A B2B analytics company selling into EU enterprises cared about category fit and German-language directories more than raw count. They DIY'd EU-specific forms from catalog filters and used Light for the English easy pool. The lesson: a filterable catalog and a pack stack. Do not expect one SKU to speak every language.

A Chrome extension with a thin marketing site kept failing directories that asked for pricing tables and desktop screenshots. They chose neither pack until they built a six-section landing page, then Light. Acceptance rate jumped because the asset kit existed. The pack was not magic. The page was.

A marketplace with two-sided copy got rejected when they pasted only the buyer pitch. They rewrote a directory blurb that named both sides, then Growth after Light proved the copy worked. Directory forms are classification. Write for the librarian, then for the customer.

An agency running directories for three client brands chose three Light orders rather than one mystery retainer. Each client got a separate report and mailbox. Buy per product.

A founder who already owned last year's vendor report wanted net-new coverage. They pasted domains, bought Growth, and still saw already-listed skips. That is normal. Bring the old report.

A hardware-adjacent IoT dashboard did not fit SaaS or AI on half the forms. They DIY'd developer-tools indexes and skipped a generic blast. Twelve strong listings beat eighty confused ones. They bought Light later when a cloud SKU was actually software.

A nonprofit climate data site had no paid budget beyond $50. They chose Light and ignored prestige ladders. They treated directories as citations for researchers, not as a growth engine, and still wanted dofollow where it existed. Pick the entry SKU. Prestige packs are optional.

A freelance SEO burned by a '500 submissions' freelancer who delivered 404s chose Growth because the refund path was explicit. They used screenshots in a monthly client PDF. Proof policy is a feature. Buy it when you need it.

A two-person team with a $200 quarterly distribution budget bought Light ($49) and kept $151 for one paid directory they chose from the public table. They did not blow the rest on a $199 prestige pack they would not QA. Attention is the scarce input.

When not to buy

Do not buy if the site is parked, if legal has not approved public copy, if you cannot watch a mailbox, or if you believe the pack includes G2 Leader. Do not buy if you need a contractual DR floor. Do not buy if you wanted a bot. Do not buy if you wanted a weekly launch leaderboard (use a launch platform, then come back).

Do not buy Growth as your first act on a product that has never been submitted anywhere and still has lorem. Buy Light or DIY ten rows. Learn what rejects look like. Then volume.

Do not buy if you will not QA. A report in a drawer is a sunk $49 or $99. That is allowed, but then do not write a review that 'nothing happened' when you never opened the files.

Do not buy to replace content, PR, or a product people want. Directories are a campaign. They are not a company.

Support after the report

You will have questions: why was this skipped, why is this pending, can you resubmit after we changed the logo. Budget a thirty-minute review with yourself before you email anyone. Half of tickets are 'I did not read the skip reason'. The skip reason is usually paywall, duplicate, or missing asset.

Resubmits after a logo change are new work. Ask. Do not assume 177 silent edits. Some directories allow profile edits. Many do not without a new submit that looks like a duplicate.

If a claimed success has no screenshot, that is the conversation to have first, especially on Growth. If a live URL 404s, send it. We would rather lose a stale guaranteed tag than fake a file.

Polite, specific, row-level questions get row-level answers. 'This whole pack is fake' with no examples gets a slower, worse thread. QA ten rows. Send three links.

How we talk about success internally so you can copy it

Submitted: form completed, evidence stored. Confirmed: email link clicked when required. Live: public listing URL loads and mentions the product. Pending: editor queue. Rejected: editor said no, reason if we have it. Skipped paid: paywall. Skipped listed: already there. Skipped dead: unreachable. Skipped unfit: category or geo or asset gap.

If you use that taxonomy in Slack, your co-founder will stop asking 'are we done with SEO'. You are never done with SEO. You can be done with this pack's labor.

Success rate is not 100 percent live. A healthy Light run might be a mix of live, pending, and skips. Anyone who sells 100 percent live in seven days is selling a pool of auto-publish low-friction sites only, or they are lying. Ask which.

We would rather show skips than invent screenshots. If that sentence is not the culture you want in a vendor, you want a different vendor. We will not pretend otherwise to close $49.

Mixing this pack with other vendors without wasting money

Export domains from every report into one sheet. Dedupe. The second vendor should see that sheet. Already-listed skips are cheaper than duplicate labor and cheaper than duplicate spam signals on the same index.

Do not run two DFY directory packs in the same week 'to go faster'. You will collide on verification mail, on accounts, and on the same sixty obvious sites. Sequence them.

Launch platforms, PR, and directories stack. A ScrollLaunch or Product Hunt week plus Light is coherent. Two directory packs plus a DR-or-refund product plus a G2 campaign in the same week is how finance gets involved.

If another vendor's report was excellent, stay. If it was thin, write one specific complaint (missing screenshots, dead URLs) before you switch. Switching without a complaint trains you to churn forever.

What '177+' is allowed to mean

The plus means the live guaranteed set can be larger than a round marketing number. It does not mean we will pad with paid review sites, expired domains, or three URLs on the same property to inflate count. If we complete more easy forms than 177, that is the plus. If the set shrinks because we killed dead tags, we still owe you the Growth queue we sold, from the current pool, with proof.

Ask for the count of claimed successes with evidence, the count of skips by reason, and the count of pending. Those three numbers describe a run. A single '177 submitted' slide does not.

We will not redefine submitted to include 'we visited the URL'. Visiting is not submitting. The screenshot should show a form completion state.

If you need a fixed list of 177 named domains in a contract, say so before checkout. The default product is labor against the tagged pool, which moves as the web moves. Named-list contracts are a different conversation than the public SKU.

Asset kit: a boring folder that predicts acceptance

Create a folder: logo.png (square, 512 or larger), logo-dark.png if you have it, screenshot-app.png, screenshot-pricing.png, screenshot-og.png, description-short.txt (300 to 600 characters), description-long.txt, categories.txt, pricing.txt, canonical-url.txt. That kit is the pack. Everything else is commentary.

OG images that are 1200 by 630 help directories that ask for a social image. App screenshots should show UI, not a conference booth. Faces are fine. Blurry phones are not.

If your brand has a wordmark that is unreadable at 64 pixels, also export an icon-only mark. Grids of directories are small. A long wordmark becomes a smear.

Keep a changelog in the folder when copy updates. Workers should not guess whether the new tagline replaced the old one mid-week. Freeze copy on intake day when you can.

Copy that survives a category dropdown

First sentence: product type and audience. 'Acme is a billing API for SaaS companies that issue usage invoices.' Second sentence: the mechanism. Third: the proof (customers, open source, or a concrete outcome). Do not lead with a metaphor.

Avoid 'platform', 'solution', and 'ecosystem' as the only nouns. Directories file those under spam or under a generic software bucket you will never rank in.

Pricing line: free tier / paid from $X / request a demo. Empty is worse than 'request a demo'. Fake $0 is worse than empty if you do not have a free tier.

If you have two products, write two kits. Do not mash them into one paragraph and hope the dropdown understands.

Security, privacy, and what workers see

Workers see the public site, the copy you gave, and the mailbox you assigned. Do not put customer PII in the long description. Do not put API keys in screenshots. Redact staging URLs that are not meant to be public. Directories are public.

If your app is behind a login, give a demo account or public marketing screenshots. A worker is not your pentest team. They should not receive production admin.

Verification mail contains tokens. Treat the mailbox as sensitive. Shared access should be the minimum set of people.

We are not your DPA for directory third parties. Each directory has its own privacy policy. If that is unacceptable, DIY only the directories legal already approved, or skip the category.

Metrics that matter versus metrics that flatter

Matter: unique live listing URLs, unique root domains, skip reasons, proof coverage on claimed successes, referral clicks if you can see them, indexation of those URLs over six weeks.

Flatter: raw URL count, 'DR acquired' as a sum of directory DRs (that sum is meaningless), time-to-first-screenshot of Ahrefs, number of countries in a report you cannot serve.

Cost per submitted form is a vendor metric. Cost per indexed listing is an SEO metric. They diverge when directories never get crawled, when listings stay in moderation, or when the page is noindexed. Track both if you care. Do not only track the vendor metric.

Hypothetical: Light at $49 with 35 indexed listings later is about $1.40 per indexed listing. Growth at $99 with 80 indexed is about $1.24. Those examples are ranges for thinking, not promises. Your mix will differ.

Paid directory budget next to a pack

Cap paid directory spend. A $499 featured listing on a DA 20 index is usually a bad ad. A $299 slot on a directory your buyers actually browse can be a good ad. The catalog's job is to make the price visible before you feel committed.

Never let a pack upsell replace a media plan. Chrome Web Store promo, GitHub Marketplace featured, and Reddit ads are not 'directories you forgot to submit'. They are paid products.

If sales chat anywhere says 'dofollow guaranteed' on a paid row, read the live page. Link type is a directory policy. Vendors do not override rel=nofollow.

Keep paid on a separate budget line from Light or Growth. When finance asks what the $99 was, the answer is 'manual forms in the easy pool, with proof'. When they ask what the $499 was, the answer is 'an ad'. Mixing the answers is how SEO budgets get frozen.

Already on Product Hunt, still need directories?

Yes if you want indexes beyond a launch week. Product Hunt is one referring domain with a lot of cultural weight. Directories are many smaller mentions. They stack. They are not substitutes.

Do not paste your PH tagline into every directory if the tagline is a joke that does not classify the product. Librarians do not file jokes.

PH week plus Light is a known pattern. Start the profile before PH so workers are not blocked while you are doing launch support.

A PH badge on the homepage does not make a thin product page pass directory validation. Still ship features, pricing, and screenshots.

Second site, second SKU, second mailbox

A new product is a new pack. A rebrand with a new domain is a new pack if listings should point at the new URL. An extra language landing page is not always a new site if directories should still list the canonical English URL. Decide canonicalization first.

Do not ask us to 'just add the sister brand in the leftover slots'. Slots are not leftover identity. They are forms that publish a name.

If you shut down a product, we cannot un-list 60 directories as a pack feature. Unlisting is a different chore, often manual, often ignored. Keep that in mind before you submit a doomed beta URL.

For agencies, a price list that says 'Light per property' is easier to sell than a custom 'we'll figure it out'. Use pricing.

QA script you can run in thirty minutes

1. Pick ten claimed successes at random, not the first ten (those are often the easiest).
2. Open each screenshot. Does it show a confirmation or a listing, or a captcha or a homepage?
3. Open each live URL if provided. Does it 200 and mention the product?
4. Count unique root domains in those ten.
5. Read every skip reason in the full report. Cluster them: paid, listed, dead, unfit.
6. Check that the canonical URL in listings matches the URL you wanted.
7. Check name spelling and that the logo is not a broken image.
8. If Growth, list any claimed success with no log or no screenshot/trace. That list is the refund conversation.
9. Put live URLs into your sheet. Do not consider the pack 'done' until the sheet exists.
10. Send three specific questions, not a vibe.

If you cannot spare thirty minutes, you bought a pack you will not use. That is allowed. Do not then demand a DR miracle.

Print this script into your SOW if you are an agency. It is the difference between reselling labor and reselling a PDF.

What a good skip reason looks like, and what we do with it

A good skip reason is specific enough to retag the catalog: paid $59 after the description field, already listed at this URL, requires iOS build, requires EU VAT, form 404, Cloudflare loop, category list has no software, login requires a company LinkedIn that we do not have. A bad skip reason is 'failed' or 'error'.

Skip reasons are how guaranteed stays honest. If the same site skips paid for three customers, the tag should change. If you see a guaranteed row that is obviously paid, tell us. You are not being difficult. You are being an operator.

High skip rate on a guaranteed pool is a signal to retag, not a signal that you should immediately chargeback. Send the log. We would rather lose a stale tag than fake a screenshot.

Skips you asked for (no gambling, no certain countries) should appear as your constraint, not as our failure. Write constraints in intake so the log can cite them.

The difference between a directory, a community, and an ad

A directory is an index of products with a submit form or an editorial process. A community is Indie Hackers, Reddit, Slack, Discord. An ad is a featured slot, a sponsored newsletter, a review-site boost. Packs that 'submit you to communities' are a red flag. We will not pay a worker to spam a forum. You should not either.

If a row in the catalog is actually a forum, DIY with a human post or skip. If a row is an ad, it will have a price. If a row is a directory, it belongs in Light or Growth only when it is in the guaranteed pool.

Review sites that require customers are not guaranteed easy forms. They are customer ops. Plan them separately.

This distinction is how you keep SEO, community, and paid media from collapsing into one guilty spreadsheet.

Ahrefs, Moz, and why this page will not sell you a score

We sort the catalog by DR by default. We show DA when we have it. Both are third-party estimates. Google does not read them. If you buy a pack to screenshot DR 15 for a tweet, you are buying a tweet. Maybe that is worth $49. It is not worth lying to a customer about Google.

When Ahrefs updates slowly, every vendor looks ineffective in week two. Plan the screenshot for week six or do not plan it. See our DR versus DA and how-to-increase-DR guides if you need metric literacy. This page will not repeat a fake hockey stick.

Summing directory DR into a 'we acquired 2,400 DR' slide is numerology. DR is not additive that way. Stop it before a client believes it.

If a competitor guarantees a DR number, that is their product. Ours is evidenced forms. The vs SubmitSaaS page exists because that fork is common.

Intake fields people forget until they stall the run

Twitter/X URL, GitHub URL, and LinkedIn URL appear on many forms. If you do not have them, say none. Do not paste a personal profile you do not want public next to the company.

Founded year, team size, and HQ country are common. Inventing a San Francisco HQ when you are a two-person EU LLC can bite you on geo directories. Tell the truth or skip geo indexes.

Support email versus verification email: they can be the same. If support@ is a Zendesk that eats confirm links, they cannot be the same.

Hashtag-style categories ('#AI #productivity') are not a substitute for the directory's dropdown. We map to their taxonomy. Your hashtags are optional extras only when a tags field exists.

What happens if the product URL changes mid-pack

Tell us immediately. Continuing to submit the old URL wastes the queue. Some already-submitted rows cannot be edited. You will live with mixed URLs unless you buy a later cleanup, which is not a standard SKU.

Redirects help users and eventually help indexes. They do not automatically rewrite directory profiles. Assume each listing is a snapshot of the URL at submit time.

A marketing site migration (Webflow to custom) with the same domain is usually fine. A domain change is not. Treat domain change as a new campaign.

Do not 404 the old page the same day you migrate if listings still point there. Keep redirects for months, not hours.

Moderation is not the vendor being slow

Moderation is the directory protecting their index. Tell your co-founder the difference on day one: submitted versus live. If you promised '100 live backlinks in a week', you promised a fantasy. Promise evidenced form completes in the pack window, live URLs as editors allow.

SubmitLoop's week-ish Light copy is a labor estimate. Believe labor estimates. Do not believe editor estimates from anyone who does not own the directory, including us.

Nudging an editor is sometimes possible (a polite follow-up email). It is not a pack feature we can SLA. If a listing is still pending after a month, DIY a polite ping or skip emotionally. Obsessing over one pending row is how you ignore 40 live ones.

Rejected-for-fit is not personal. Recategorize and move on. Do not argue with a volunteer editor in a way that gets the domain banned.

Using Light as a trial for Growth

Light is a good trial of our pool, our proof style, and your own intake discipline. If Light's report is files you can use, Growth is a volume knob. If Light's report reveals your copy gets rejected, fix copy before you buy 177 more chances to reject.

Tell us at Growth intake that Light already ran, and attach the domain list. Already-listed skips should rise. That is health, not sabotage.

Do not buy Light and Growth on the same morning 'to be safe'. You will overlap labor and mail. Sequence them.

If Light felt too small, that is a feeling. Count live-plus-pending before you upgrade. Feelings are bad at arithmetic.

What we store as evidence, in plain language

A result record with outcome, filled field count, and error if any. Page text at the end of the attempt. One or more screenshots. Sometimes a trace of the run. That folder is how we argue with ourselves about whether a row was success.

You should receive a report that lets you see those artifacts, not a vibes paragraph. If a vendor only sends 'all done!' in email, you do not have a report.

We will not put your private staging passwords into a public screenshot. Redact. If a screenshot accidentally includes a token, rotate and tell us. Humans mishandle a tab sometimes. The fix is rotation, not a press release.

Keep your own copy of the evidence. Vendors are not your archive for five years unless a contract says so. Download when the report lands.

Legal-ish boundaries without pretending to be your lawyer

Do not ask us to submit false company numbers, fake reviews, or trademark-infringing names. We will refuse. That refusal is not a refund of the whole pack if the rest of the queue is valid, but it is a skip cluster you should have expected.

Adult, gambling, weapons, and similar categories may be excluded from the guaranteed pool or skipped by policy. If that is your product, ask before you pay. A SaaS billing pack is the default shape of this SKU.

Medical and financial products need copy legal already approved. Workers will paste what you give them. They will not practice medicine.

If a directory's terms ban paid submitters, we still complete a normal form as a person representing your product. We do not scrape behind logins we should not have. We do not buy hacked accounts.

A note on 'best directory submission service' posts

Most roundups are written by vendors. We have this page. Discount both. The only numbers that matter are checkout, sample proof, and whether the catalog is usable without a card.

If a roundup ranks someone first because they paid for the roundup, that is an ad. If a roundup uses DR guarantees as the scoring rubric, we will lose on purpose.

Use vs BacklinkBot, vs LaunchDirectories, vs SubmitSaaS, and vs TinyLaunch when you want pairwise detail. Use this page when you want the service explained without a forced winner table against one rival.

After you read, you will be tempted to open five more posts. You have enough to decide on Light, Growth, or DIY. Decision fatigue is the real competitor.

Checkout paths, and what to do in the next hour

If the profile is complete and you want sixty guaranteed forms with evidence, open Light signup. If you want 177 or more on the same pool with proof-or-refund on claimed successes, open Growth signup. If you want to stare at prices again, open pricing.

If you are not ready, DIY three catalog rows today. The catalog does not require a pack. Paid rows stay visible. Guaranteed is a chip you can click without paying.

If a competitor tab is still open, read only one vs page, then decide. Two hours of comparison is how launch week moves and the mailbox stays empty.

Complete the kit folder even if you DIY. The folder is the asset. The vendor is optional.

A closing briefing you can paste to a co-founder

SubmitLoop Light is $49 for 60 guaranteed easy-form directories, one site, manual humans, about a week after a complete profile. SubmitLoop Growth is $99 for 177+, same pool, one site, refund if claimed successes lack log plus screenshot or trace. Guaranteed means completable forms with proof, not instant publish, not a DR number. We will not run bots, will not promise DR, will not buy G2 Leader. Paid directories stay in the public catalog and are extra. Already-listed rows skip when we can see them. You still need a verification mailbox. The public catalog remains DIY-able.

That paragraph is the product. If it matches what you wanted, pay. If you wanted a different paragraph (48-hour DR jump, 300-row blast, tailored 30 with credentials, brand-name review platforms included), buy that other product on purpose, not by accident.

The FAQ on the page is short because this article is the long answer. The explorer is the tool. Pricing is the SKU. Signup is the door.

You can respect BacklinkBot, LaunchDirectories, SubmitSaaS, and TinyLaunch and still only buy one motion this month. Directories reward a finished queue more than a perfect vendor debate.

Appendix: intake copy you can reuse

Canonical URL: https://example.com (must 200). Product name: as it should appear in indexes. Tagline: one line, no metaphor. Short description: 300-600 characters, audience plus mechanism. Long description: features, who it is for, pricing posture. Categories: three we will repeat. Languages: list. Countries we can serve: list. Verification mailbox: directories+product@yourdomain (we can log in / we cannot, we will forward). Prior reports: attached domains. Hard skips: list. Login walls: in scope or easy-slice only. Paid placements: we will buy separately, do not checkout on our card.

Paste that block into intake. Edit the parentheses. You just removed half of the stall class.

If legal must review the long description, do that before payment day. A pack waiting on legal is a pack waiting on you.

If design must export a square logo, do that before payment day. A pack waiting on Figma is a pack waiting on you.

Appendix: how to brief an intern if you still DIY

Give them the kit folder, the catalog filtered to Guaranteed, a vault, and the skip taxonomy. Tell them ten rows a day is success. Tell them twenty rows of garbage is failure. Sit with them on row one. Then leave them with the mailbox calendar.

Pay them more than $49 if they will do sixty careful rows. Otherwise you have rebuilt Light with worse evidence. The pack exists so you do not have to manage that intern.

If the intern is you, the same brief applies. Future you is the manager. Present you is the worker. The folder is how you do not fight.

When the intern asks whether to pay $59 mid-form, the answer is no unless that domain is on the pre-approved paid list. That sentence saves the budget.

Appendix: board and investor language

Do not say 'we bought 177 backlinks'. Say 'we completed a documented directory submission campaign against an easy-form pool, with evidence files, listings going live as editors allow'. If an investor wants DR, show a six-week Ahrefs screenshot and the listing sheet, not a vendor slogan.

Do not say 'SEO is done'. Say 'directory labor for this quarter is done'. SEO is content, product, and the rest of the graph.

A $99 line item does not need a six-page memo. This article exists so you can link it and save the memo.

If the investor is allergic to directories because of 2000s spam, show them three live high-quality listings and the skip of paid junk. Evidence changes that conversation. Volume bragging does not.

Appendix: what 'manual' looks like hour by hour

Open the next slug. Load the submit URL. Dismiss overlays. Detect whether a listing form is visible or whether a login wall or paywall sits in front. Create an account if required, using the verification mailbox. Confirm email. Map labels (website, product name, category, description, image) to the kit by meaning, not by hoping the field is named TITLE. Fill. Solve captcha. Stop if a price appears. Store screenshot. Classify confirmation. Mark outcome. Next slug.

That loop is the product. There is no secret API that directories give us. Anyone selling a secret API is selling a bot or a lie.

Multi-step wizards are still the loop: after Next, re-read the page. New fields mean another step. Thank-you text means success. Validation errors mean fix and retry. We do not hardcode one site's CSS into a fantasy of scale.

If you want to watch that loop, you are asking for a follow-along session. Default delivery is the files at the end. Both are manual. Only one is a meeting.

Appendix: already-listed detection without drama

We search the directory for your product name and URL when that is practical. We believe a prior report you attach. We skip when a profile is clearly you. We may miss a listing under an old name. Attach old names in intake.

If we submit a duplicate by miss, the directory will usually reject or merge. Tell us. It is a row-level fix, not a reason to burn the whole Growth refund unless we also claimed it as a new success without evidence.

If you want every possible duplicate because you think more URLs help, you are wrong for Ahrefs referring domains and annoying for editors. Stop.

If you rebranded and want the old listing updated, that is an edit request. Put the old URL in intake. Do not hope we notice.

Appendix: refunds, chargebacks, and being a decent customer

Growth's proof-or-refund is a specific machine. Use it when proof is missing on claimed successes. Do not use a card chargeback because you wanted instant publish. Chargebacks after delivered labor are how processors punish sellers and then everyone else's prices rise.

If you are unhappy for a reason this page warned about (DR, G2, bots, editors), the honest move is to accept the SKU you bought or ask for a goodwill gesture, not to rewrite history.

If we failed the clause, you should get the refund. That sentence has to be true or the clause is an ad. Hold us to files.

Light customers should still get files. A missing screenshot on Light is a support ticket. Escalate if files never appear. The difference is the public contractual frame on Growth, not a license for Light to be theater.

Appendix: filters as a decision tool, not a home

Sort DR descending. Note Custom price. Filter Dofollow if SEO is the goal. Filter Free if cash is the goal. Filter Guaranteed if you want the Light and Growth pool. Then either DIY five rows or buy the pack and stop picking at the table. The explorer is a decision tool. It is not a place to live for three weeks.

Language and country first, then DR, is the order that prevents wasted forms. DR first is how you spend a day on a chamber of commerce that needs a VAT number.

Traffic estimates are noisy. Use them as a tie-break, not as gospel. A DR 40 directory your buyers read beats a DR 70 directory nobody in your category visits.

When you are done deciding, close the table. Open intake or open the first DIY form. Motion is the point.

Appendix: one-site examples that still confuse people

docs.example.com versus example.com: list the marketing URL unless the product is the docs. app.example.com: usually still the marketing URL. example.com/ai: only if that path is the product and directories allow paths. A GitHub repo URL: only if the product is the repo and you want to be listed as open source, which many SaaS directories will reject.

A Webflow placeholder on a new domain while production is elsewhere: wait until canonical is stable.

A Notion public page as the product URL: some directories accept it, many look amateur. Ship a real page.

A Linktree: no. Buy a page, then buy Light.

Appendix: what we mean by trace when a screenshot is the wrong artifact

Some confirmations are redirects with almost no visible thank-you chrome. Some are JSON-backed wizards where the visible page is a spinner. A stored trace (run record, final URL, page text) can evidence completion when a PNG would show a blank spinner. Growth's clause says screenshot or trace so we cannot hide behind 'the page was not photogenic'.

A trace is not a vague log line that says success=true with no URL. It should be inspectable. If you cannot tell what happened, it is not proof. Ask.

We still prefer a human-readable screenshot when the UI has a thank-you. Traces are the fallback, not the escape hatch.

If both are missing on a claimed success, Growth's refund machine is on. That is the point of the SKU.

Appendix: working with a co-founder who hates directories

They are remembering 2000s link farms. Show them the skip of paid junk, the public paid prices, the no-bot rule, and three live listings on indexes they recognize. Do not show them a 177-row spreadsheet first. Spreadsheets trigger the old memory.

Give them this page. If they still hate it, DIY five rows together. Shared hatred of captchas is bonding. Then buy Light so you never do it again.

If they want PR instead, do PR. Directories can wait. Do not fight a co-founder for $49 of ideology. Fight for a complete product page. That helps every channel.

If they want DR by Friday, this page is your backbone. You are not being unambitious. You are refusing a fake SLA.

Appendix: international founders and US-centric indexes

Many startup directories are US-English by default. That can still help a global SaaS if the product is English-first. It does not help a local-language consumer app that cannot serve US users. Filter country. Tell us. Do not collect US leads you will ignore.

Payment in USD for the pack is not the same as listing geo. You can buy Light from anywhere we can charge and still only target geographies you serve.

If your company name is in another script, provide a Latin listing name if you want US-English indexes to file you. That is a product decision, not a trick.

VAT on our invoice, if any, is checkout's problem. VAT on a directory's paid listing is your media budget. Do not mix them.

Appendix: the easy pool is not 'low quality' by definition

Easy means the form. Quality is relevance, indexation, link type, and whether your buyers go there. Some easy forms sit on strong domains. Some hard forms sit on weak domains. Do not invert the tag into a snob filter that sends you only into $299 sales calls.

If you want only DR 60+ dofollow, DIY that filter. The pack will still run guaranteed, which includes a range. You can ask in intake to prefer higher DR inside the pool. You cannot ask the $49 SKU to become a custom media plan of twenty dream sites that are all paid editorial.

Snobbery that refuses nofollow DR 80 properties can refuse real humans. Keep a mixed diet.

Snobbery that accepts every DR 10 dofollow blogroll can look like spam. The catalog columns exist so you do not have to be a snob or a dumpster. You can be an operator.

Appendix: time zones, async labor, and 'why no update today'

Manual queues run on business days. A Tuesday intake can still mean a Wednesday start. 'No update today' during a Growth run usually means forms were filled and evidence was stored, not that a newsletter was due. We optimize for files, not for daily recap emails.

If you need a daily recap, ask. It is a communication preference. It is not the default because daily recaps without files train everyone to perform motion.

Time zones: verification links expire. If you are APAC and workers are US, overlap hours matter for codes typed into open tabs. Say your hours in intake.

Silence plus a full evidence folder is a good vendor. Noise plus no files is a bad one. Optimize for the first.

Appendix: what to put on the homepage after the pack

Three to seven badges of directories you are proud of, linking to the live listing URL, not to the directory homepage. Linking to the homepage wastes the click. Linking to a 404 wastes trust. Wait until live.

Do not badge a pending listing. Do not badge a nofollow blogroll you would not show your mother. Badge is brand, not SEO. SEO is the href on the directory's page pointing at you, which you do not control from your own badge strip.

Update OG screenshots if you use 'as seen in' in ads. Misleading 'as seen in' on properties that rejected you is a fast way to lose trust.

A simple strip beats a marquee of forty gray logos. Restraint looks like a real company.

Final word before the FAQ on the page

Light is $49 for 60 guaranteed easy-form directories, one site, manual, about a week after a complete profile. Growth is $99 for 177+, proof-or-refund if claimed successes lack log plus screenshot or trace. The catalog stays public for paid rows and DIY. We will not bot, will not promise a DR number, will not buy you G2 Leader. Intake, mailbox, and already-listed skips are how the week actually works. Paid is extra.

Start at pricing, Light, or Growth. Compare in detail at vs BacklinkBot, vs LaunchDirectories, vs SubmitSaaS, and vs TinyLaunch only if you still have a rival tab open.

The FAQ below is short on purpose. You already have the long answer. Go complete the kit, or go pay, or go submit three rows yourself. Any of those beats another hour of theory.

16038