How saasgrow.ai is built (and why nothing is pay-to-rank)
The rules this directory runs on: how a listing gets in, why the order is not for sale, and what the badge is actually for.
This is a directory of SaaS growth tools. Before the first listing went live we had to answer a question every directory eventually gets asked, usually by someone who has just been outranked by a worse product: is this order for sale?
It is not. This note is the long version of that answer, and the rest of what we decided.
Nothing is pay-to-rank
No placement in this directory can be bought. There is no sponsored slot inside a ranking, no boost, no package that lifts a listing above another.
What decides the order is readers. Listings are ranked by upvotes, and tools nobody has voted on yet fall back to how recently they were listed — so today, with voting barely started, the front page is mostly the newest work. That is a thinner claim than "we ranked them for you", and it is the true one.
Voting is open to anyone, and it is worth being straight about what that costs: an open vote can be pushed by someone determined enough. We would rather say so than imply a precision we cannot back. We watch it, and if it stops meaning anything we will change the mechanism and say that too. What we will not do is sell the position — that is the one distortion a reader has no way of detecting from the outside.
That is a constraint on the business, not a marketing line, so it is worth being precise about what it rules out. It rules out paid placement in any list a reader would read as ranked. It rules out an advertiser being quietly excluded from a critical comparison. It rules out an ordering that changes when an invoice is paid.
If that ever changes — if there is one day an ad unit or a promoted row — it will be labelled where it appears, on the page it affects. Not in a policy page nobody opens.
The whole value of a directory is that its order means something. Sell the order and there is nothing left to sell.
How a listing gets in
Every listing is screened before it goes live. Both kinds: the ones we research and write up ourselves, and the ones makers submit.
Screening is looking for a small number of things:
The product exists, works, and is what the page says it is.
A real team is behind it, reachable, and still shipping.
The category fits — a tool filed under the wrong heading helps nobody.
Nothing about the listing is misleading: not the pricing, not the claims, not the screenshots.
We publish the standard, not the mechanism. How submissions are assessed in detail stays internal, for the obvious reason: a directory that publishes the exact test it applies is publishing a checklist for gaming it. What we will commit to is the outcome — a listing that is live has been looked at by us.
Rejections happen and they are not personal. The most common reason is not that a product is bad; it is that the submission described something the product does not do yet.
Why there is a badge
A listed tool is asked to put a small badge on its own site. Two reasons, and neither is decoration.
The arrangement runs both ways. We send readers and a link to a product. The badge sends readers back. A directory that takes links and gives nothing is an extraction machine, and there are enough of those.
It proves control. Anyone can submit a URL. Only someone who controls the site can put something on it. That is the cheapest honest proof of ownership we could find that does not involve emailing documents around.
What the badge is not is a payment. It costs nothing, it is a single line of HTML, and removing it does not get anyone thrown out — it just ends the reciprocal part of the arrangement.
The things we decided not to do
Some of these were tempting, which is why they are worth writing down.
No per-tool public scores. A single number next to a product invites an argument about the number instead of a decision about the product, and it flattens the thing that actually matters — that different tools are right for different teams.
No fake urgency. No countdowns, no "3 spots left", no invented launch windows.
No gated downloads. Anything useful on this site is on the page. If we build a checklist or a calculator, it works without an email address.
No listing we would not use ourselves. Volume is the easiest metric for a directory to grow and the fastest way to make it worthless.
Who runs this
We do, and we also run two other directories: launched.tools and toolsnetwork.co. They cover different ground — AI tooling, comparisons, pricing explainers — and where one of them is linked from this blog it will be because it answers a question this site does not.
Saying so up front seems better than having someone work it out and wonder what else was not mentioned.
What happens next
This blog runs twice a week: growth playbooks, metric explainers, stack guides for the categories we actually cover, and the occasional build note like this one. The directory grows alongside it — every tool named in a post gets a listing here, so the two stay in step.
If a listing is wrong, or a ranking looks indefensible, tell us. That is the only quality control that scales.
Frequently asked
- Can I pay to rank higher?
- No. There is no paid placement, no sponsored slot in the ranking, and no package that moves a listing up. If that changes, it will be labelled on the page it affects, not buried in a policy page.
- Is a listing free?
- Yes. Submitting is free and staying listed is free. The directory makes nothing from a listing existing.
- Why do I have to add a badge?
- Because the arrangement runs both ways. We send you readers and a link; the badge sends readers back. It is also the simplest proof that a real person controls the site being listed.
- Who runs this?
- We do — the same team that writes this blog. We also run two other directories, launched.tools and toolsnetwork.co. Anywhere one of those is linked from here, it is because it answers something this site does not.