Login walls, paid tiers and the forms that are not there
Most destinations do not take a plain form. Here is every route we have measured, what each one costs you in time, and which ones to skip.
“Submit your site” implies a form. For most destinations there is no form on the page you land on. These are the routes, measured across the 1445 destinations we track.
| Route | Count | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Plain form | 493 | Two minutes with the brief in front of you. Start here. |
| Form behind a click | 172 | The same form, revealed by a button, a tab or a modal. Look for Submit, Add, List or + in the header. |
| Account first | 281 | Sign up, verify the email, then submit. Use one address for all of them so the confirmations land in one place. |
| Magic link | 20 | No password, but you must be able to read that inbox at the moment you submit. |
| Form somewhere else | 78 | A Typeform, Airtable or Google Form on another domain. Fine, just slower. |
| Pitch an editor | 76 | A written email to a person. The highest effort and, on the good ones, the highest value — these are the sites with actual readers. |
| Payment before publication | 101 | A real decision, not an obstacle. See below. |
| OAuth | 8 | Sign in with Google or GitHub. Quick, but it ties the listing to whichever account you used — pick one deliberately. |
| Submission page gone | 103 | Skip. The URL does not answer. |
When a paid listing is worth it
Paid is not automatically bad, but the question is not “is it cheap?” It is
whether the page sends readers. Before paying, check the outbound link is
dofollow and not sponsored, find out whether the fee is
one-off or annual, and open two or three existing paid listings to see whether they
look like a curated page or an advertising slot. If the site declares paid placement
correctly — which good ones do — you are buying traffic, not ranking.
What we will not doSolve a captcha for you, or use a service that does. Roughly one destination in eight puts a challenge in front of the form; those need a person, and a person is what they get. Anyone offering to automate past them is either lying or doing something you would not want attached to your domain.