We Checked 104 Startup Directories. Fourteen of Them Are Gone.

The standard "50 places to launch your startup" article is copied from another one. You can tell, because they all contain the same dead links.

We keep a directory index, which means we have to fetch these sites rather than cite them. On 31 August 2026 we ran the whole list. Fourteen of the directories that appear on current, indexed, well-ranking launch round-ups are not there anymore — and the failure is rarely a broken link you would notice. Most of them still return a page. It is just no longer the site you were sent to.

Here is what actually happened to each one.

Four have become something else

These are the dangerous ones. The domain resolves, the page loads, and if you are working through a checklist you will tick it off without noticing you have submitted to the same place twice, or to nothing at all.

Betapage → PitchWall. betapage.co 301s to pitchwall.co. Betapage was one of the most-recommended pre-launch boards for years and it still appears as its own row on most lists, usually a few rows away from PitchWall. They are one destination. Submitting to both is submitting once.

Godly → Recent. godly.website now redirects to recent.design. Same kind of design gallery, new brand. Worth knowing because Recent takes submissions through an in-page dialog rather than a /submit URL, so a link to the old domain teaches you nothing about how to actually get listed.

Screenlane → Page Flows. screenlane.com redirects to pageflows.com, which is a paid user-flow library that does not take open submissions at all. This one is not a rebrand you can follow — the thing you were trying to submit to stopped existing as a submittable surface.

Supertools → a newsletter. The Supertools AI tool directory now redirects to therundown.ai, a newsletter homepage. The directory is not hiding behind a menu; it is gone, absorbed into the publication that ran it.

Seven answer nothing at all

No page, no redirect, no holding message. These simply fail:

Two of those deserve a note. Erli Bird was a beta-tester recruitment service, and if that is what you actually wanted, Betabound is live and does the same job. And sideproject.io is not the same thing as sideprojectors.com, which is alive and well and listed here — the two get conflated constantly, and only one of them exists.

One 404s at its own root

aitoolhunt.com returns a 404 on its homepage. Not a redirect, not a parking page — the site serves a not-found for its own front door, while continuing to appear on AI-directory round-ups as an active place to submit.

One is parked for sale

maketoolkit.com serves a "Domain For Sale" page. Whatever it indexed is gone, and the domain is now inventory.

One is live but takes no submissions

aitoolsarena.com loads a working homepage full of listings, which is why it keeps getting recommended. But /submit 404s and there is no submission link anywhere in the HTML it serves. It is a directory you can read and not a directory you can join, which is a different thing from what the lists claim.

Why this keeps happening

Nobody re-checks. Writing "50 directories to launch on" takes an afternoon if you copy the previous four articles, and it ranks. Actually fetching 104 sites, reading what came back and deleting the ones that died makes the article shorter and the work longer, and shorter is not what that format rewards.

The cost lands on you. A directory round is already a slow, manual afternoon — account, description, logo, category, screenshot, repeat. Spending part of that afternoon on four dead domains and two duplicates of the same site is the difference between a useful day and a frustrating one.

How to spot a dead one in ten seconds

Before you fill in anything:

1. Watch the address bar. If the URL you typed is not the URL you land on, you have found a rebrand or an absorption. Check whether the destination is already on your list.
2. Look for a live listing with a recent date. A directory with nothing published in the last few months is not going to review your submission either.
3. Find the submit path before you write your copy. If /submit 404s and no submission link appears in the page, there is nothing to submit to, whatever the round-up said.

What we do with this

Every one of these fourteen is recorded in our own data as dead, with the reason and the date, rather than silently dropped — because "we checked this and it is gone" is more useful to you than a shorter list. The 104 that are alive each carry what we could verify: the real rel on their outbound link where we could read it, the price where the submit page named one, and an honest "this site blocks automated checks" where that is the truth.

If you want the list of which of those actually pass link authority, we read the rel attribute on all of them. And if you would rather be on a list that gets re-checked, you can submit your product — it is free and there is no queue.