justship.now Is My New Front Door

If you've read anything else on this blog, you know the pattern by now. I ship something, I write about why, and a few weeks later I'm explaining why I changed my mind about half of it. roastme.gg and ownthe.day were both built and shipped inside a single week, in public, warts included. This post is a quieter version of that same habit, applied to my own portfolio instead of a new product.

I just swapped the number one project slot on my own site. For a while that spot belonged to makers.page. As of this week, it's justship.now.

Nobody asked me to explain that swap. I'm doing it anyway, because the reasoning is more interesting than "I like it better now," and because a chunk of you reading this are indie hackers deciding what your own front door should say about you.

What justship.now Actually Is

justship.now is a curated directory of tools for developers, indie hackers, and startup builders, paired with a build-in-public blog I write myself. That's the one-line version, and it undersells it a little, so here's the longer one.

The directory currently runs across more than 20 categories: boilerplates, frameworks, UI and design, icons, component libraries, AI tooling, databases, ORMs, authentication, backend frameworks, APIs, internationalization, testing, jobs and queues, payments, accessibility, storage, hosting, CI/CD, DevOps, CMS, monitoring, logging, email, marketing, and analytics. Browse it at justship.now/browse and you'll find well over a hundred individual tools sorted into those buckets, each with a short, opinionated description instead of a generic one-liner pulled from the tool's own marketing page.

That opinionated part matters more than it sounds like it should. If an entry says a tool is "worth paying for," that's me telling you I've actually used it and think the price is justified, not a sponsor telling you that. If an entry says "open-source" or "MIT-licensed," that's a signal I put there because I know indie hackers specifically care about that detail before they care about feature lists. Nothing on the directory is a paid placement. There's no "featured" tier you can buy your way into. The ranking a tool gets is based on whether I think it's actually good, not on whether anyone wrote me a check.

Underneath the directory sits the blog, which is the part most directories don't bother with. It's not a changelog. It's build-in-public writing about the actual process of shipping things, including a post on mybutler, the local-first AI assistant I wrote about here too, and pieces on domain metrics and the harder truth that building software got fast while getting anyone to actually use it didn't get any easier. Same voice you're reading right now, just living on a second domain.

Why a Curated Directory Instead of Another Crowdsourced List

I looked at what already exists in this space before building anything, because "tool directory for developers" is not an empty category. It's a genuinely crowded one, and it's worth being honest about that instead of pretending justship.now showed up in a vacuum.

There are GitHub "awesome lists" for basically every stack imaginable, community-maintained, free, and often excellent, but they live and die by whoever's still willing to merge pull requests two years after they made the repo. There are aggregator directories like PeerPush and 1000.tools that organize submissions by category and let the crowd do the curating. There's Product Hunt, which is less a directory than a daily popularity contest, useful for a launch-day spike and mostly useless six months later once your listing has scrolled off the front page of anyone's memory. And there are directories that explicitly cap themselves, like the 1000-tool list that charges a small submission fee specifically to filter out low-effort spam, which tells you something honest about what happens to a directory once submissions are free and unmoderated.

Every one of those models solves a different problem than the one I actually wanted solved. An awesome list scales, but nobody's actually vouching for any individual entry beyond "it got merged." A crowdsourced directory scales even further, but the same lack of a real filter that lets it scale is what lets it fill up with dead links and abandoned projects nobody prunes. Product Hunt optimizes for launch-day noise, not for "what should I actually reach for in month six of building this."

justship.now doesn't scale the way any of those do, and that's the point, not the limitation. Every entry is something I've either used myself, watched a founder I trust ship with, or dug into closely enough to have an actual opinion about. That's a smaller list than a crowdsourced one will ever be. It's also a list where "it's in there" means something more specific than "someone filled out a form." If you've read my piece on why generic link-in-bio tools fail founders, this is the same argument applied one level up: a list of buttons tells you nothing, and neither does a list of tools nobody's actually vetted. Curation is slower and it's the only version of this that I'd trust enough to send a friend to.

Why It Beat makers.page for the Top Spot

Here's the part that's specific to my own site rather than the wider argument about directories. makers.page isn't going anywhere. It's still live, submissions for the featured directory side are still open, and I still believe in what it's building toward. But it currently has two halves that are in genuinely different states. The "get featured" side is fully open right now, free review, dofollow profile if you're approved. The Marketing Assistant MCP, the part that drafts channel-native social posts from inside the coding agents you already run, is still in early access and waitlist.

I didn't want the very first thing a visitor to my site clicks on to be something half-gated behind a waitlist, no matter how good the gated half eventually turns out to be. justship.now has no waitlist anywhere in it. You can browse the full directory right now, and if you're a builder with a tool worth listing, you can submit it right now too, no approval queue standing between you and being live on the page. The number one slot on my own portfolio is the one place where I want zero friction between "someone lands here" and "someone gets value," and right now that's justship.now, not the product still finishing its rollout.

That's not a verdict on makers.page long-term. It's a statement about what belongs at the very top of my site today, which is a different question, and one I plan on revisiting again the moment the answer changes. I've swapped this slot before and I'll swap it again.

The Submission Flow, for Builders Reading This

If you build tools and you want in, the flow is intentionally boring: there's a "Submit a Tool" link on the directory, you fill it out, and I review it myself. There's no fee, no sponsored tier, no fast-track for anyone. I'm not going to pretend that scales infinitely, a one-person review queue has an obvious ceiling, but the ceiling is the price for a list that means something. I'd rather have 300 tools I can vouch for than 3,000 I can't.

If you're on the other side of that trade, a maker deciding whether directory submissions are even worth your time, that's a bigger question than this post can answer honestly in a paragraph. I wrote a separate piece specifically on whether startup directory submissions still move the needle for SEO in 2026, with the actual data instead of vibes, because it deserves more than a drive-by mention here.

What This Says About Where I'm Spending My Attention

I've written before about distribution being the actual moat, not the build, and this is that argument showing up in my own priorities instead of someone else's launch. A tools directory with a blog attached isn't a flashy product. It doesn't have a payment flow or a leaderboard or a countdown clock daring people to keep it alive. What it has is something more durable: it's the kind of thing people bookmark, come back to when they're starting a new project, and share with someone else who's stuck picking a stack. That's a slower kind of growth than a viral leaderboard, and it's the kind that compounds instead of spiking and decaying.

Putting it in the number one slot on my own site is me betting on the slow kind, at least for the next chapter. I've been wrong about which project deserves that spot before, and I'll probably be wrong again eventually. For now, this is the one I'd point a stranger to first.

Frequently Asked

What is justship.now? A curated directory of 300+ tools for developers, indie hackers, and startup builders across 20+ categories, paired with a build-in-public blog. Browse it at justship.now/browse.

Is it free to submit a tool? Yes. There's a "Submit a Tool" link on the site, no fee, no paid placement tier. Every listing gets reviewed before it goes live.

Why did you make it your featured project instead of makers.page? makers.page still has its Marketing Assistant MCP gated behind early access and a waitlist. justship.now has nothing gated. I wanted the top slot on my own site to be something anyone can get value from immediately.

How is this different from an "awesome list" on GitHub or a crowdsourced directory like PeerPush? Those scale further than justship.now ever will, on purpose. Every entry here reflects an actual opinion I have about the tool, not a merged pull request or an unmoderated submission form.

Does listing on justship.now actually help with SEO? It can, if you're picking the right kind of directories in general. I broke down the real 2026 data on directory submissions and backlinks in a separate post.

If you want to see what's actually in it, go browse: justship.now. If you've built something worth listing, the submission form is right there too.