Where to promote your SaaS
Last checked 6 August 2026
Most answers to this question are a list of a hundred websites. A list is not the hard part — you can find one in a minute. The hard part is that most of the hundred will not take your product, several will take a payment and send nobody, and the order you approach them in changes how many of them say yes.
So this is not a list. It is the shape of the answer: what kinds of places exist, how to tell in about two minutes whether a given one is worth your afternoon, and which to do first.
There are only three kinds of place
Everything that could send you a customer falls into one of three buckets, and the buckets behave completely differently. Confusing them is the most common reason a promotion plan produces nothing.
- Free submission
- Directories, aggregators, launch platforms, awesome-lists. You fill in a form and wait. The cost is your time and the currency is qualifying: they have requirements, and most rejections are for failing one you did not read.
- Paid placement
- Sponsored newsletter slots, directory upgrades, review-site vendor profiles, community sponsorships. Fast, measurable, and the only bucket where you can lose money rather than time. Ask for the last three sponsors and email one of them.
- Direct outreach
- A person — a newsletter author, a community moderator, a YouTuber, someone who wrote a comparison post your product belongs in. Slowest to start, hardest to scale, and the only bucket where the answer can be a partnership rather than a link.
Why founders ask this on Reddit, and what the thread usually leaves out
A large share of the people searching this add "reddit" to the query, which is a precise signal: they want the answer from someone who did it, not from a vendor selling the thing being described.
That instinct is right, and the threads are genuinely better than most vendor blogs. What the threads consistently leave out is the failure rate. Someone posts the twelve directories that worked; nobody posts the thirty that ignored them, which is the number that would have told you how to budget your week. Read the threads, then assume roughly half of any list will not respond and plan the week around that instead of around the successes.
How to judge a place in two minutes
Before you spend an hour on a submission, four checks eliminate most of what is not worth it.
- Does anyone read it?
- Open the site's own newest entries. If the most recent addition is from last year, the directory is a parked domain with a form. Check the date, not the design.
- Are your competitors there?
- If three products in your category are listed, the category exists there and someone maintains it. If none are, you are either early or in the wrong place, and early is the rarer of the two.
- What does it require?
- Read the submission rules before writing anything. A screenshot in the wrong ratio, a missing pricing page, a personal-domain email address — these are the actual reasons submissions get dropped, and all of them are cheap to fix beforehand and impossible to fix afterwards.
- What does it want in return?
- Some directories want a backlink, some want a review, some want money, and some want you not to promote at all. The last kind is common in communities, and it is written in their FAQ.
The order that wastes the least time
Start with free submissions, because they are the only bucket where being rejected costs you nothing but an hour, and because they produce the assets — a listing page, a category, a comparison entry — that the other two buckets later point at.
Move to direct outreach second, while the free submissions are still pending. A newsletter author who agrees to mention you takes three weeks from first email to publication, so it has to start before you need it, not when you do.
Buy placements last, and only where you already have a number to compare against. A sponsorship is the only one of the three where you can spend the budget before finding out the audience was wrong, and the way to avoid that is to know what a visit from a free listing was worth first.
The part nobody writes down
Every list you find answers "which places exist". Almost none answers "what did the place ask for, and what happened when I submitted". That second question is the whole job, and it is the reason the same twenty directories appear on every list: whoever wrote the list copied it from the previous list, and none of them submitted.
Keep your own record from the first submission — where, on what date, what it required, and what came back. After ten of them you will know which kinds of place answer, which reject, and what they reject for, and that record is worth more than any list of two hundred.
Questions
- How many places should I submit to?
- Enough that the pattern becomes visible, which is usually around twenty. Fewer than that and a run of silence tells you nothing; far more and you stop reading requirements properly, which is what causes the silence.
- Do directory listings still help with SEO?
- Some do and most do not, and the ones that do are the ones with editorial standards — which is the same thing as saying the ones that are hard to get into. Treat a link as a bonus and judge a listing on whether its readers are your buyers.
- Should I pay for a directory listing?
- Only after a free one from the same category has sent you a visitor you can trace. The paid tier of a directory that sends you nothing for free will send you nothing for money.