Building is no longer the bottleneck — AI took care of that, and anyone can ship anything now. What's left is harder: did you have the taste to build the right thing, and can you be found at all among millions of products that also exist? Curation is the scarce good in that world, and almost nobody is actually doing it.
What I like: SaaStore reviews listings before they go live — a real security scan, a UX audit, and a persona audit against your ICP. I got a detailed report back that found a legitimate technical issue on my own landing page. For a directory, that's an unusual amount of effort, and it's the whole point: a catalog that accepts everything is just more noise.
The direct-checkout piece is the interesting bet: buyers pay on the SaaStore listing page rather than clicking through to your site. Before switching mine on, they ran a full sandbox purchase and verified the billing cycle against what I'd told them — they've apparently caught plans described as one-time that were actually monthly subscriptions.
What I'd flag: still early and still small. I've seen traffic but no conversions yet, and the payment setup was an afternoon of work. If you want a directory that will move volume today, this isn't it yet. If you want one that's building for how buyers actually find software now — asking an AI instead of Googling — it's a good place to be early.
