How much money app directories actually make

If you are deciding where to submit your app, it is worth knowing how the site you are submitting to makes money. It tells you what it wants from you, which is not always a listing.

So we checked. Thirty directories, launch platforms, review sites and newsletters, with every revenue figure traced back to a filing, an interview, an acquisition announcement or a published rate card. Where a number could not be traced, we say so instead of repeating it.

Two things came out of it that we did not expect.

The biggest company in this category is shrinking fast

Gartner Digital Markets owns Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice. It is the largest business of this kind by a wide margin, and its own 10-K shows revenue going from $371.0M in 2023 to $296.6M in 2024 to $227.4M in 2025. That is a 39% fall in two years. Gartner booked a $150.0M goodwill impairment on it and sold the unit to G2 in February 2026 for about $110.0M, which is roughly 0.48x trailing revenue.

A business selling for half of one year's revenue is a business the market expects to keep shrinking. AppSumo is down about half over the same period, by its founder's own account. Slant is down 43% year on year.

The pattern is not hard to read. These sites were built on Google sending people to them, and AI answers are taking that traffic. Anything you are told about directory traffic that was true in 2023 needs rechecking.

Five widely-quoted revenue figures are not real

This is the part worth knowing if you ever plan to cite one of these numbers.

G2 at $271M. This figure circulates in secondary coverage and appears in no filing, no press release and no aggregator. We could not find a source for it anywhere. The defensible range from disclosed data is $115M to $180M standalone.

Product Hunt at $3.9M ARR. The page this comes from is titled "Product Hunt Revenue 2024" and its own metadata says the company raised $0 and has 77 employees. Product Hunt raised roughly $7.5M in venture funding. If the funding field is wrong, the revenue field is not evidence.

Toolify at $2.34M. Traced to a page that prints the figure with no methodology and lists founders and a seed round belonging to a different company entirely. It is a contaminated record.

Ben's Bites at seven figures from ads. Traced to a podcast episode title. The write-up of that same episode confirms the founder pivoted away from the ad-supported model.

Futurepedia's revenue. No figure exists publicly. The only hard number is from HubSpot's Q2 2026 10-Q, which discloses the acquisition closed on 2026-04-03 and included approximately $8.6M of consideration.

We are not saying these sites are small. We are saying the numbers you have read about them were mostly made up by SEO pages quoting each other.

What the honest numbers look like

At the top, the businesses are large and mostly not what you would call directories any more. Gartner Digital Markets at $227.4M is a pay-per-click ad network. G2 sells vendor profiles at a $28,000 median contract. TrustRadius sells syndication rights to reviews your own customers wrote.

At the size most people are actually choosing between, the numbers are much smaller and much more verifiable, because these founders publish them:

• OpenAlternative: about $80k a year, from 23 subscribers. That is roughly $258 each.
• SaaSHub: roughly $130k to $165k, from about 106 sponsors paying $99 to $130 a month.
• Uneed: $100k to $130k.
• SubmitSaaS: $60k to $90k, all one-off purchases, no subscriptions.
• TinyLaunch: $65k to $85k, also entirely one-off.
• Startup Fame: about $16k, from 81 subscribers at roughly $17 each.

Look at Startup Fame next to OpenAlternative. Similar category, similar audience, and a five-fold difference in revenue that is almost entirely price per sponsor rather than number of sponsors. The lesson these founders learned is that the money in this category is a small number of well-priced placements, not a large number of cheap ones.

What this means for where you submit

Three things follow from the data, and they are all practical.

A free listing on a site with no visible business model is the risky one. If you cannot tell how a directory pays for itself, the answer is often your email address, or a reciprocal link it will ask for later. A site with an obvious paid product has less reason to want anything else from you.

Ask what the placement delivers, in numbers. Every site in this list that clears six figures publishes one. SaaSHub says "an estimated 10 to 18 targeted referrals a month". There's An AI For That prints an estimated cost per click next to its price. Console.dev publishes that 68% of its readers have signed up to a featured tool. If a directory will not tell you what a listing sends, that is the answer.

A price that is too low is a warning, not a bargain. Comparable fixed placement in this category clears $99 to $258 a month. A site charging $9 for the same inventory is telling you what it thinks the inventory is worth, and it is usually right.

Why we published this

We run a directory. Writing this meant publishing that the category we are in is shrinking, that several of our competitors are bigger than us, and the honest price range for the thing we sell.

We did it because the alternative is what everyone else in this category publishes: a list of directories with invented DR scores and revenue figures nobody checked. If you are going to spend a weekend submitting your app to forty of these sites, you should be able to find one page that tells you which ones are real.

Every number here is traceable. Where we could not trace one, we said so rather than repeating it, and there were more of those than we expected.

Method. Thirty sites screened across launch platforms, AI tool directories, B2B review sites, deal marketplaces, submission services and newsletters. Revenue figures checked against SEC filings, founder interviews in named publications, acquisition disclosures and published rate cards. Twelve flagged figures were re-checked against primary sources; five did not survive and are named above. Figures are as of August 2026 and several are estimates, which we have marked as such rather than presenting as fact.