Introducing: Submit Your AI Tool to PromptHive

You can now submit an AI tool to PromptHive for review. The form is at /submit/, it takes about ten minutes, and it costs nothing.

That last part is the interesting bit, so let’s start there.

What this replaces

Getting an AI tool listed in a directory today usually works like this. You find the submit page. It offers a free tier with a queue measured in months, and a paid tier — often $200 to $400 — that gets you in within days. Somewhere further down, a “featured” placement is available, sometimes as a flat monthly fee, sometimes as a bid-per-click auction where the highest bidder sits at the top of the category.

Nobody involved is being deceptive. The pricing is right there. But the result is a listing whose position tells a reader nothing about the product and everything about the marketing budget behind it. Readers worked this out some time ago, which is why the most common description of this category is “convenient, but I don’t trust the rankings.”

We think that is a market failure with a specific shape, and the shape is the opportunity.

Why we are not charging

PromptHive earns its money from display advertising and affiliate links, both disclosed. It does not and will not earn money from listings, placement, ratings or reviews.

This is not modesty about the revenue. Paid placement is the highest-margin thing a site like this can sell, and we are turning it down on purpose, because we have worked out what it would cost. The moment a single slot is for sale, every sentence on the site changes meaning. “Our pick for teams” stops being a judgement and becomes an unanswerable question: did they pay for that? Once a reader has to ask, they have to ask about everything — including the ninety-odd recommendations that were made honestly.

There is no version of this where you sell one placement and keep the credibility of the rest. So the refusal is published rather than implied. It is on how we review, it is in the footer of every page, and it is the first thing the submission form tells you.

The self-interested version of the argument: this is the only asset here that a better-funded competitor cannot buy. Anyone can out-scale us. Nobody can out-refuse us, because refusing costs them the revenue they already depend on.

Why a person reads every one

The other decision worth explaining is that submissions are reviewed by hand, and we cap how many tools we cover.

The instinct in this category is to scale. The largest directories list around thirty thousand tools. That number is offered as the product, and for a while it was — until people started checking. A developer who submitted to fifty-plus directories found roughly 40% of listings were dead links: products that had shut down, been acquired, or renamed, still sitting there reading as live recommendations.

That failure is not carelessness. It is arithmetic. Every listing has a maintenance cost — prices change, free tiers close, products get renamed — and at thirty thousand listings nobody can pay it. Scale converts accuracy from an advantage into an impossibility.

So we cap the catalogue. There are 39 reviews today and the ceiling is somewhere around 150. Every one has been used by someone, every price carries the date we last checked it against the vendor’s own page, and when a product dies the page stays and says so rather than quietly lying.

Three examples of what that catches, all found by hand while doing something else:

• DALL·E had been retired by OpenAI. We were publishing a review of it stamped with a recent pricing check.
• Windsurf no longer exists under that name — Cognition renamed it Devin Desktop, and the old domain now redirects. Every directory still listing “Windsurf” as a current product is wrong.
• Claude Code is not included in Claude’s free plan, contradicting several secondary sources that say it is. That one only surfaces if you try to use it without paying.

Each of those took a person twenty minutes. None of them would have been caught by importing a vendor’s own description, which is what a submission form is for at most directories.

What is actually in it for you

Being plain about this, because “exposure” is not a benefit and we are not going to pretend it is. PromptHive is a young publication with modest traffic. If you are looking for a volume play, a paid listing somewhere larger will send more clicks this month.

What a submission here gets you instead:

A review a reader believes. The watch-outs are the reason the strengths land. A page that says “this is excellent for X, and genuinely bad at Y” converts better than a page of adjectives, because the reader can tell someone actually used it.

Verified pricing that stays verified. Your plan structure, described accurately, with the date it was checked. When you change it, tell us and we update it. Most directories will still be quoting your 2025 prices in 2027.

A reason you exist, written by someone outside the building. The submission form asks what a reader can do with your tool that they cannot do with the ones we already cover, and names of the competitors you would be compared against. Founders routinely tell us that question was the hardest part of the form. That is the question your prospects are asking silently.

A correction channel. You can email us about a factual error and it gets fixed that week. You cannot appeal a judgement — and that is the same protection working in your favour, because it applies to the competitor above you as well.

Data residency stated as a fact. We ask where the company is based and we publish it. It is the first question in agency, regulated and enterprise procurement, and essentially no other directory records it. If you are based somewhere that is an advantage for a given buyer, this is one of the few places that will say so.

What it looks like from your side

The form is six short steps: the tool, a description, pricing and access, brand assets, your details, then a review of everything before you send. It autosaves to your own browser as you type, so you can go and find your pricing page and come back. There is nothing to sign up for.

You will get a reference straight away and you can check the status with it at any point. Every stage is an email: received, under review, anything we need from you, and the decision — with reasons, including when the answer is no. A rejection here is a paragraph explaining which specific thing did not work, not silence and not a template.

The two documents worth reading first are the submission guidelines, which are literally what a reviewer checks in the order they check it, and how to get your AI tool featured, which is the same information from the other direction.

One request

The single most useful thing you can do in the form is name your product’s weakness.

Every review we publish has a watch-outs section — that is not negotiable, and it applies to the tools we rate 4.5 as much as the ones we rate 2. So the question is never whether the limitation appears on the page. It is only whether we found it ourselves, after a submission implying there wasn’t one.

Founders who tell us the rate limit, the missing integration, the workflow it cannot handle yet, get reviewed faster and, in our experience, rated more generously — because everything else in the submission becomes more credible at once. It reads as confidence, and it is confidence.

Submit your AI tool →