Introducing Tool List

Tool List is live. It is a directory for new products, and the whole idea fits in one sentence: paste your link, get a permanent page, keep the backlink forever. No upvotes to chase, no comments to farm, no launch day to survive.

That sounds small. It is deliberately small. Here is the reasoning behind it.

Why another directory

Launching a product on the usual platforms has quietly turned into a job. You pick a date. You warn your friends. You wake up at midnight in the right timezone. You spend the day refreshing a leaderboard while your position moves for reasons that have very little to do with whether the thing you built is any good. At the end of it, most makers get a spike of traffic that vanishes in forty eight hours and a link that may or may not pass any authority at all.

The part that actually matters to a new product is much duller than the leaderboard. You want search engines to know you exist. You want a real page with your name, your description, and a link that crawlers follow. You want that page to still be there in a year. None of that requires a competition.

So we built the boring half and threw away the rest.

What the list actually is

The home page is a list of everything that has launched, newest first. That is the entire sort. There is no algorithm deciding what you see, because there is nothing to decide: the most recent thing is at the top, and it moves down as other people ship.

Every listing gets its own page, not just a row. The page carries your product name, your tagline, your description, your icon, and an outbound link. It is server rendered as plain HTML, which matters more than it sounds like it should: a crawler, a badge checker, or an AI assistant reading the page sees your link without having to run any JavaScript.

Listings are grouped into categories like AI, Dev Tools, Design, Finance, and No-code, and there is a search box that goes straight to the matching tool page rather than bouncing you off the site. Structure instead of community. You can browse the list without ever being asked to participate in anything.

One domain, one listing

A rule worth stating out loud: one domain means one listing. You cannot post the same product four times under slightly different names to fill the top of the list, and neither can anyone else. It is enforced in the database, not just in the form.

This is the quiet thing that keeps a reverse chronological list readable. Once duplicates are impossible, the list stays a record of what shipped instead of a record of who submitted most aggressively.

Submitting takes about a minute

The first screen asks for one thing: your URL. We fetch the page, pull out your name, tagline, description, and icon, and hand it back to you already filled in. You fix whatever we got wrong, pick a category, and you are done.

We did not want an application form. Most directories ask for a dozen fields before they will look at you, and most of those fields are already sitting in your own meta tags.

How the dofollow link works

A dofollow link is one search engines are allowed to pass authority through. A nofollow link can still send you visitors, but it counts for much less. Plenty of directories are vague about which one you are getting. We would rather be specific, so there are exactly three ways to be listed:

• Badge, free. Put our badge on your site, we verify it is really there, and your link goes out dofollow. The trade is honest: a link back for a link back.
• Dofollow, $9 one time.Same dofollow link with no badge on your site. For people who do not want anyone else's markup in their footer.
• Featured, paid for 30 days. A slot on the home page, plus a dofollow listing with no badge required.

Listings submitted for free without the badge still get a page and still get indexed. Their outbound link is nofollow, and we say so on the page rather than letting you find out with a link checker.

Nothing expires except the featured slot. The page you get on day one is the page that is still there next year, at the same URL.

What we are not building

No upvotes. No comments. No streaks, karma, badges of honor, or weekly leaderboards. Those mechanics exist to manufacture engagement, and manufactured engagement is exactly what turns a launch into a chore. If we ever add a way for one listing to outrank another through activity, we will have built the thing we were trying to avoid.

We are also not promising you a traffic spike. A directory listing is a foundation, not a growth strategy. What it does is remove the dumbest reason a good product fails, which is being invisible to everyone whose job is to find things.

What is next

The near term list is short and unglamorous: better category pages, a feed you can subscribe to, and more of the data a maker actually wants to see about their own listing. If you want something on that list, tell us.

In the meantime, the list is open and it is filling up. If you have shipped something, put it up. It takes a minute, and then it is there for good.