Introducing applauncher.dev

There are plenty of places to launch an app. Most of them share the same shape: a daily feed, a leaderboard, a paid queue skip, and a listing page that goes quiet the day after your launch. We built applauncher.dev because the interesting part of a launch is not the day. It is the page that is still there a year later, still getting found, still sending people to your product.

What this is

applauncher.dev is a curated launch directory. You submit an app, a human reviews it against a published bar, and approved apps launch into a dated feed and then live on permanently as a structured listing. That listing feeds category pages, platform pages and best-of roundups, so the work you do writing it keeps paying out long after the launch window closes.

Three things make it different from the directories we studied before building this one.

Platform is its own axis. Most directories mix platform and purpose in a single category list, so Chrome Extensions sits next to Marketing and a terminal tool has to pick whichever label fits worst. Here there are twelve categories, nine platforms and a curated tag layer, all independent. Your app can be Developer Tools and CLI and Linux and self-hosted at the same time, and each of those is a real page with real search demand behind it.

The dofollow link is earned, never sold. One competing directory sells a standalone nofollow to dofollow upgrade for five dollars. It is honest about it, and it is also precisely what Google’s link spam policy describes. We do not have that SKU and never will. Outbound links start nofollow on a tracked redirect and turn dofollow when you clear one of three bars: ten upvotes during your launch window, a verified badge live on your own site, or an editor’s pick. Paying moves you up the queue. It does not touch the attribute.

Rejection is predictable. Every reason we would turn a submission down is published in advance with a named code, and a rejected paid submission is refunded in full, automatically, in the same email that carries the reason. Some directories promise that paid launches are never declined. That makes the review theater, and it makes every badge on the site worth less.

Who it is for

Four groups, and we built something specific for each.

Solo developers and indie hackers get distribution without a budget: a free submission that is genuinely reviewed, a launch date inside thirty days, and first-class listings for CLI tools, self-hosted projects and browser extensions rather than a SaaS template with the wrong fields.

Startup product teams get a launch moment they can schedule a sprint around, plus a listing structured for both people and answer engines. Fast Track is reviewed within twenty four hours, which is short enough to commit to a date in a release plan.

App marketers and growth teams get attribution that works. Every outbound link runs through a redirect that appends a referral parameter and counts the click server side, so the traffic shows up in your analytics and in a launch report rather than disappearing into direct.

Agencies and freelancers get a repeatable process: three free tools that front-load the preparation, magic link editing so there is no account sprawl across client projects, and published reason codes so a rejection is a fixable list rather than a mystery.

The week one six

We are opening with six apps, chosen from a pool of twenty nine verified candidates. Every one of them is flagged as a seed listing, is unclaimed, and is excluded from rankings, because a seeded app sitting on a leaderboard on day one would make the leaderboard worthless.

• Focus Friend, a Pomodoro timer built around a knitting bean that sulks when you pick up your phone. It won Google Play’s Best App of 2025 overall and an Apple App Store Cultural Impact award in the same year.
• Coolify, a self-hosted alternative to Vercel, Heroku and Netlify, with 62,123 GitHub stars as of 2026-09-21 and a solo maintainer funded by sponsorships rather than venture capital.
• Lovable, which turns plain English into deployable full-stack web apps and reached 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue in eight months.
• Tiimo, a visual daily planner designed for neurodivergent brains, named Apple’s 2025 iPhone App of the Year.
• Firecrawl, which turns any website into clean structured data for AI agents, with an oversubscribed 14.5 million dollar Series A in August 2025.
• Dub, open source link management and attribution with 24,796 GitHub stars as of 2026-09-21.

Two credibility anchors, three indie or small-team proofs that craft is what gets you in, and one tool our audience will start using the same afternoon. The rest of the pool arrives in batches of four or five a week, which keeps the directory looking alive to both crawlers and visitors rather than dumping twenty nine listings on one day and going quiet.

How to submit

Paste your app’s URL. The server fetches the page and pre-fills your name, tagline, description, logo and images, and detects your platforms from store links, a package manifest or an extension manifest. You edit the draft with no account at all. At the end you enter an email, and clicking the magic link both verifies the email and submits the listing. That same link is your permanent edit link.

What you need before you start: a live and usable product on a domain you control, a landing page that explains what it does, a working install or signup path, at least one real screenshot, and three to eight written features. What we do not list: waitlists, directories, templates, boilerplates, courses, ebooks, affiliate resale sites and vaporware.

Free submissions get a launch date fourteen to thirty days out. If the queue ever starts stretching, we add slots rather than letting the wait grow, because a free tier with a six month line is not a free tier.

Read the submission guidelines before you write anything, run your landing page through the OG and meta tag checker, then submit your app. We will read it.