Where to Submit Your Indie Game or App for Free

Search for somewhere to put your game and you will find the same article fifteen times: a list of 200 directories, no dates, no detail, and a submission form at the bottom. Most of those links are dead, paid, or point at a page nobody has read since 2019.

This is the shorter version. It covers the places that will genuinely list an indie game or app for nothing, what each one is actually for, and how to judge the next directory somebody recommends to you.

First, a filter you can apply to any directory

Before you spend an evening filling in forms, four questions will tell you whether a listing is worth the time.

• Does it cost anything to be listed? Not "is there a paid tier" — plenty of good places have one. The question is whether an unpaid listing is visible at all, or whether free submissions sit in a queue that never moves while paid ones go straight to the front page.
• Does the page persist? A launch-day feed gives you a spike and then buries you. A directory page keeps working: it stays indexed, it accumulates reviews, and somebody can find it in eight months. Both are useful, but they are not the same thing, and you should know which one you are getting.
• Is the link crawlable? If every outbound link is marked nofollow and wrapped in a redirect, the listing can still send you real people, but it will not do anything for your own search visibility. Worth knowing before you treat it as an SEO play.
• Do actual humans use it? Open the site's newest listings. If the most recent one is from four months ago, you are submitting to an archive.

Anything that fails all four is a link dump. Skip it.

Prepare the submission kit once

Every platform asks for roughly the same things in a slightly different shape. Writing them once and keeping them in a file turns a forty-minute submission into a five-minute one.

1. A one-line description, under about 60 characters, that says what the thing is rather than how it makes you feel.
2. A short description of roughly 150 characters for cards and previews.
3. A long description of two or three real paragraphs — what it does, who it is for, what is honest about the limits.
4. A square icon at 512×512, and a wide image around 1280×720 for the platforms that want a banner.
5. Three to six screenshots from the actual current build, not from a mockup generator.
6. Your store or download links, a privacy policy URL, and a contact address you will still read next year.

The privacy policy is the one that stalls submissions most often. If you do not have one, write it before you start, because half these platforms require it and all the app stores do. There is a longer breakdown of each of these — the sizes that matter, what a screenshot has to show, and what you can safely leave out — in the press kit guide.

Marketplaces that host the build

These give you a download or play page, and will host the files themselves. Useful when you do not have a store presence yet, or the thing is a web build.

• itch.io — the default for indie games, and free to upload. It hosts web, desktop, and mobile builds, has a working discovery system through tags and jams, and lets you keep a real store page without a publisher. If you only do one thing on this list, do this one.
• Game Jolt — a community platform built around indie games, free to publish to, with a social feed attached. It skews younger and more community-driven than itch, and posting updates is a real part of how things get seen there.
• IndieDB — long-running, free to list, and still indexed well. Its interface shows its age, but a page there tends to stay findable.

None of these replace the app stores if you are shipping a mobile game. Google Play charges a one-time developer registration fee and Apple's developer programme is an annual one, so "free" stops at the store door — but everything above will host a build and send people to it before you have paid for either.

Launch communities

These are event-shaped. You get a day, or a week, of attention and then the feed moves on. That spike is genuinely valuable for the first hundred users, but do not confuse it with distribution.

• Product Hunt — free to post, still the biggest launch audience for anything tool-shaped. Games do less well there than apps and utilities do; be realistic about which one you have built.
• Show HN on Hacker News — free, no submission process beyond posting. Technical audience, blunt feedback, and a real spike if the front page picks it up. Works best when there is something interesting about how you built it.
• Indie Hackers — free, founder-heavy, and more receptive to the story of building the thing than to the thing itself.

The pattern that works on all three is the same: post it yourself, be present in the comments for the whole day, and answer criticism instead of thanking people for feedback.

Communities where people actually install things

This is where the first real players tend to come from, and it is the part most launch lists skip because there is no form to fill in.

• Subreddits for your specific thing — there are active communities for playtesting, for Android apps, for particular genres. Every one has its own self-promotion rule, and every one can tell the difference between a developer who reads the sub and a developer who found it ten minutes ago.
• Discord servers for indie developers and for genres — slower, but the people who try your build here will tell you why they stopped playing, which is worth more than the install.

Both reward showing up before you need something. The submission is not the work; being a member of the community is the work.

Directories that keep a permanent page

This is the category Valeri is in, so treat the rest of this section as an interested party talking.

A directory listing is worth having when the page persists, when the ranking is something you can actually move by making a better product, and when the page is crawlable. It is not worth having when placement is for sale, because then the ranking tells a reader nothing and they learn to ignore it.

For what it is worth, listing here is free, there is no fee to be ranked, and nothing on the board is sponsored. Every listing starts on zero points and moves on upvotes, reviews, and comments from the people who tried it. The formula is published on the home page, which is the part that matters — a ranking you cannot audit is just an advert with extra steps.

What to skip

• Anything that charges for "expedited review" and nothing else. Paying to jump a queue on a site nobody reads buys you a faster nothing.
• Bulk submission services. They fill in 300 forms with the same text. The listings that survive are the ones a person read.
• Directories with no visible dates. If you cannot tell whether the site was updated this year, assume it was not.
• Anything asking for your store credentials. No legitimate directory needs them.

After you submit

The submission is the cheap part. Two things afterwards do more than the next ten listings would.

1. Link back from your own site. A game page that links to its itch page, its store listing, and its directory entries makes all of them easier to find, and it is the only part of this you fully control.
2. Update the listings when the product changes. A page with current screenshots and a version from this month reads as maintained. A page with 2024 screenshots reads as abandoned, whatever the release notes say.

Then go build the next version. The listing is a door, not a strategy — and no amount of directory submissions will fix a thing people try once and close. If it is already live and the installs are not arriving, work down the diagnosis first before you spend another evening on submission forms.

If you have something ready, put it on the board. It is free, it stays free, and a real person reads every submission.

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