Directify's lifetime deal ended on March 5, 2025. The original founder, Serg Karakhanyan announced it in one line on X: “It's gone. No more Lifetime Deals for Directify.”
Directify's own page confirms it. “Our Directify lifetime deal wrapped up on March 5, 2025.”
Then he sold the company. Serg Karakhanyan built Directify, grew it, and handed it to Venelin Kochev in 2026. One of the buyers put it plainly: “I bought the lifetime deal for @DirectifyApp from @karakhanyanS before he sold the company to @venelinkochev.”
As someone who has built multiple directories, and uses Directify for the majority of them, I have communicated with both Serg and Venelin on many ocassions. And both have a real commitment to improve and enhance the directory platform.
So here's the situation if you want to build directories today. The cheapest way into Directify is $12 a month. The cheapest way to run unlimited directories on Directify is $149 a month, which is $1,788 a year, every year, forever.
Listable will sell you unlimited directories for $339 once.
That's the whole reason this post exists. I checked both pricing pages on September 5, 2026, and I checked live sites built on both platforms to see what actually comes out the other end. Here's what I found, including the parts that don't flatter either product.
Disclosure: my Listable link is an affiliate link and my Directify link carries my tracking code. Neither company saw this post before it went up, and I've included real cons for both. If a comparison page has no downsides in it, the writer is selling, not comparing.
What Listable actually is
Listable, at get-listable.com, is a hosted no-code directory builder. You run a setup wizard, pick a template, import or add listings, point your domain at it, and you have a directory site. There's no WordPress, no plugins, no server, no updates to install.
It is not the Listable WordPress theme. Different company, different product, same unfortunate name. If you've been searching “listable” and getting theme results, that's why.
It's built by John Richardson, working solo as far as I can tell, and the public changelog shows releases landing roughly every week. The most recent one at the time of writing was August 20, 2026. That matters more than it sounds, and I'll come back to it.
The feature set is what you'd expect and a few things you wouldn't. Custom fields of any type, all searchable and filterable. Category pages and filter-driven layouts. User submissions with moderation. CSV import with AI column mapping. Stripe and PayPal payments. Claim listings. Lead capture forms. Private and role-gated directories on the top tier. A REST API. And an MCP server, which lets you point Claude at your directory and tell it what to build in plain English.
The pricing, verified today
This is the part everyone gets wrong, because most comparison pages quote prices that were true a year ago. Both of these tables come from the live pricing pages on September 5, 2026.
Listable
| Starter | Growth | Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $9.99 | $19.99 | $29.99 |
| Lifetime | $119 | $239 | $339 |
| Websites | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Listings per site | 100 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Custom domain | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Custom HTML/CSS/JS | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Accept payments | No | Yes | Yes |
| Collect leads | No | Yes | Yes |
| Claim listings | No | Yes | Yes |
| Private / role-based access | No | No | Yes |
| REST API | No | No | Yes |
| MCP server | No | 750/mo | Unlimited |
Directify
| Free | Starter | Pro | Growth | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $12 | $39 | $69 | $149 |
| Annual | $0 | $108 | $351 | $621 | $1,341 |
| Directories | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Listings | 10 | 50 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Custom domain | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Accept payments | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Analytics | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AI content generator | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Webhooks & API | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Lifetime option | No | No | No | No | No |
A note on that. Listable's own “vs Directify” page quotes Directify at $9, $29, $49 and $99. Those numbers no longer match Directify's pricing page, which now reads $12, $39, $69 and $149. Listable's page understates what Directify costs, so the error isn't self-serving, but it's still an error.
Venelin has complained publicly about exactly this genre of page. “What annoys me more is that they have a ‘their product vs Directify' comparison page with claims about Directify that aren't accurate.” He didn't name the culprit and I'm not going to guess. I'll just say that every figure above came off the live pricing pages today, and if you're reading this a year from now, check them again.
The lifetime math
Strip out the feature talk and the decision looks like this.
You want unlimited directories. Directify Agency is $1,341 a year on annual billing. Listable Pro is $339 once. Listable pays for itself in about three months and then costs nothing for the rest of its life.
You want three directories with payments enabled. Directify Growth is $621 a year. Listable Growth is $239 once. Break-even lands somewhere around month five.
You want one directory with a custom domain and no payments. Directify Starter is $108 a year and gives you 50 listings. Listable Starter is $119 once and gives you 100 listings. Break-even is about thirteen months, and you get twice the listing headroom.
The interesting part is that the gap widens the more directories you run. If you're a one-directory hobbyist, the two are close. If you build directories the way I do, several at once, testing niches until one sticks, the lifetime option stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the whole argument.
Which brings up the obvious objection.
“Lifetime deals disappear. Look at Directify.”
Right. That's the correct thing to worry about, and it's the reason I'm not going to pretend this is risk-free.
Listable's own site describes the lifetime option as “pay once (limited).” Directify's LTD was described the same way, as a launch promotion, and then it ended, and the company changed hands. Nothing stops the same sequence happening here.
There are two separate risks and people confuse them.
The first is that the deal gets pulled. That's likely, honestly. Founders use lifetime deals to get their first few hundred customers and then close them, because recurring revenue is what makes a SaaS worth owning. If you want the Listable lifetime price you should assume it has a shelf life.
The second risk is that the company goes away and your lifetime access dies with it. This is the one that actually costs you money, and it's worth being calm about. Directify is the useful case study here, because when it changed hands, the lifetime holders kept working. The product carried on. The new owner has been publishing monthly numbers: $5,108.23 in August 2026, MRR closing in on $4k, up 26% month over month, and 400+ directory websites hosted on about $80 a month of infrastructure. Small, profitable, and boring in the good way.
Listable doesn't publish numbers like that. It claims 200+ customers on the homepage. That's a smaller business than Directify, run by one person.
So the honest framing is this. A $339 lifetime purchase is a bet that the product survives long enough to beat $1,341 a year. It needs to last about three months to break even against Directify Agency, and about a year to be obviously right. Both of those look achievable. Betting on it lasting a decade is a different bet, and nobody can sell you certainty on that one.
Keep in mind you can export your data. Listable's terms commit to providing your content free of charge in a reasonable timeframe. That's not the same as a one-click migration to a competitor, but it means you're not holding a hostage situation if things go sideways.
What the output actually looks like
Every directory builder claims to be SEO optimised. That claim is free to make, so I ignored it and went and read the HTML of live sites built on both platforms.
On craftbeergowhere.com, a real Listable directory, listing pages ship BarOrPub structured data, which is a LocalBusiness subtype. The platform picked a niche-appropriate schema type rather than dumping a generic Thing on the page. URLs are nested by location, so a bar in Melaka lives at /bars/malaysia/melaka/bier-garden-melaka. There's a sitemap with real lastmod timestamps. Titles and meta descriptions are custom per page.
That nested URL structure is genuinely good for the kind of programmatic SEO directories live on. Country page, city page, listing page, all linked, all crawlable.
Then I found the gap. Neither craftbeergowhere.com nor solarph.pro, both Listable sites, output a canonical tag. Not on the homepage, not on listing pages. The solarph.pro homepage had no JSON-LD at all.
I checked a Directify site the same way. findseotools.org has a canonical tag, ItemList structured data on the homepage, and clean flat category URLs. On the pure technical-SEO checklist, Directify's output was tidier.
Missing canonicals are not a catastrophe. Google usually picks the right URL on its own, and directories with clean unique URLs rarely have duplication problems. But if your directory has faceted filters that generate URL parameters, canonicals are how you keep the crawl budget pointed at the pages you want. It's a real gap and Listable should close it.
Here's why that matters for the decision. If you're building directories to rank, the platform's default HTML output is doing a lot of work you'll never see. Both of these platforms clear the bar. Directify clears it by a slightly wider margin today.
Where Listable genuinely wins
Price, obviously. Covered above. Unlimited directories for less than three months of the equivalent Directify plan.
Features aren't held hostage on the entry tier. Listable's $9.99 Starter includes a custom domain, custom HTML/CSS/JS, listing submissions, and priority support. Directify's $12 Starter gives you a custom domain and 50 listings, and that's about it. No custom pages, no custom code, no payments. To take money on Directify you need the $39 Pro plan. A hands-on reviewer at Uneed put it well: “Accepting payments requires the Pro plan ($39/mo); Free and Starter are for building, not earning.”
PayPal. Listable does Stripe and PayPal. Directify does Stripe, Lemon Squeezy and Creem. If your listing owners are in a market where PayPal is what people trust, that's not a small detail.
The MCP server goes further. Both platforms expose an MCP server so an AI assistant can drive your directory. Listable's exposes the full REST API, so Claude can build custom pages block by block, rearrange menus, change SEO settings, set up redirects and swap themes. Directify's is scoped more tightly around listings and content. If you already work with Claude Code or a similar assistant, that difference is the difference between “add these 200 listings” and “build me the site.”
Claude Code is an under-understood shortcut to building multiple directories.
Speed to launch. This is the thing the reviews keep landing on. A testimonial on Listable's own site from Ixchel Nayeli at CodeQueen reads: “It took me about an hour to finish from beginning to end. It took my non-techie client about 5 hours to do. It was a way better experience than Directify.” That one is hosted by the vendor, so weigh it accordingly. Over on Uneed, which is independent, Ben (@bbdesign) wrote: “I've been using another major SaaS directory alongside it, but I find Listable way better suited for my specific needs.”
Support response times. Almost every review of Listable mentions John answering fast. When you're one person shipping weekly, that's an advantage you have and a big company doesn't.
I have spoken to John over email and Reddit, and he responds fast.
Where Listable loses, and these are real
There is no analytics. At all. Listable's own comparison page admits it with a plain “No.” Directify has built-in privacy-friendly visitor tracking from the $39 tier. You can bolt Plausible or GA4 onto a Listable site through the custom scripts feature, and honestly most serious builders would do that anyway, but “install your own analytics” is a chore Directify doesn't hand you.
Installing independent analytics is not a bad idea anyway. I recently wrote a round up of the top 14 analytic platforms to choose (with many free options.)
No webhooks and no Google Sheets sync. If your workflow is a spreadsheet feeding a directory, Directify's two-way Sheets sync is a genuinely nice piece of engineering and Listable has nothing like it. Same for webhooks. Listable has a REST API on the $339 Pro tier and MCP from Growth, which covers a lot of the same ground, but it's pull rather than push.
No native AI content generation. Listable uses AI for CSV column mapping and the setup wizard. Directify's Growth plan writes listing descriptions and page content for you. You get 25 built-in AI requests a month on Listable regardless of tier, and bring-your-own-key is listed as “coming soon,” which is a phrase I've learned to read as “not yet.”
No free plan. Listable gives you 7 days and then asks for money. Directify has a free forever tier: one directory, ten listings, their subdomain and their branding. It's not much of a product, but it's enough to kick the tires for a week without a countdown running.
The REST API is locked to the top tier. $339 lifetime or $29.99 a month. On Directify you get API and webhooks at $69 a month, so on a pure monthly comparison Listable is still cheaper, but it's worth knowing the API isn't in the cheap seats.
Almost no independent review footprint. This is the one that would give me pause if I were spending real money. Listable has four reviews on Uneed averaging 4.0. Directify has twelve averaging 5.0. Neither has any meaningful presence on G2, Capterra or Trustpilot. I ran a 30-day social listening scan across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News and YouTube: Directify returned 31 mentions, Listable returned zero. Not a single organic post in a month. Keep in mind directory building tools have small search volume.
That's not evidence the product is bad. It's evidence almost nobody is talking about it yet, which means you're evaluating on the founder's claims, a handful of reviews, and whatever you can verify yourself. Which is exactly why I went and read the HTML.
Missing canonical tags. Covered above. Small, fixable, currently real.
Where Directify genuinely wins
I'd be doing you a disservice if I made this sound one-sided.
Directify is the more complete product. Google Sheets two-way sync, a Chrome extension for clipping listings, webhooks, REST API, built-in analytics, an AI content generator, 17 niche templates, and payment processing through Stripe, Lemon Squeezy or Creem with zero platform fees on top. The free tier lets you build before you pay. The technical SEO output on the live site I checked was cleaner. It has roughly three times the review volume and, based on the public numbers, roughly twice the revenue.
Directify recently added a module to sell leads directory to local business owners – and that is a killer feature if you are building local-style directories.
The new owner is shipping and transparent about it, publishing a monthly P&L including the unflattering months. As a signal of whether a small SaaS will still exist in two years, that's worth more than a testimonial wall.
And here are Directify's cons.
The big one is the thing this whole post is built on: there is no lifetime option and the company has said it isn't coming back. You are renting. At Agency tier that's $1,341 a year for as long as you own the directories. Renting good software can still be worth-while, and the hosting and infrastructure is included. That has hard costs.
The paywall placement stings. One directory until you reach $69 a month. No payments until $39. No analytics until $39. No API until $69. If you're building a portfolio of small directories, which is the actual strategy that works, Directify's pricing is shaped against you.
The theme editor still carries a Beta badge, so expect rough edges. Fine-grained per-element design control isn't the goal, as the Uneed reviewer noted, so you're composing from curated blocks rather than designing freely.
And there's a trap in the AI setup that has bitten people: “AI-generated listings have placeholder contact info: edit or delete them before going public.” The 60-second AI build is real, but what it produces is scaffolding with example.com addresses in it. Publish that and Google indexes a directory full of fake businesses. Do not skip the cleanup pass.
So which Directory Platform should you choose?
If you're building more than one directory, or you're building directories as a portfolio play and you want your costs to stop growing, Listable's lifetime tiers are the obvious pick. $339 once for unlimited sites against $1,341 a year is not a close call, and the platform does the things a directory has to do.
If you manage listing data in Google Sheets, or you need webhooks firing into other systems, or you want AI writing your listing descriptions natively, Directify is the better tool and you should just pay for it. Its free tier also means you can test the idea before you spend anything, which is the right move if you're not sure the niche has legs.
If you're building your very first directory and you're not sure you'll finish it, start on Directify's free plan. Ten listings is enough to find out whether you enjoy the work. Then move.
If you already know what you're doing and you're going to build five of these, buy the Listable lifetime before it goes the way Directify's did.
That last line isn't a scarcity tactic. It's just what happened last time, on the record, on March 5, 2025.
GetListable FAQ
Is Listable the same as the Listable WordPress theme?
No. Different companies, unrelated products. The one reviewed here is the hosted no-code builder at get-listable.com. You don't need WordPress, hosting or plugins to run it.
Does GetListable have a free plan?
No. There's a 7-day free trial on every tier, then you pay. Directify is the one with a free forever tier, capped at one directory and ten listings on their subdomain.
How much is the Listable lifetime deal?
$119 for Starter, $239 for Growth, $339 for Pro, as of September 5, 2026. Listable describes the lifetime option as limited, so verify before you buy.
Is Directify's lifetime deal coming back?
No. It ended on March 5, 2025 and Directify has said the subscription model is what they're sticking with.
Can I move my directory off Listable later?
Their terms commit to giving you your content and data free of charge within a reasonable timeframe. There's no one-click migration to another platform, so budget time for a CSV export and a re-import.
Which is better for SEO?
Both produce clean crawlable directory sites. Listable's nested location URLs are better suited to location-based directories, and it outputs niche-appropriate structured data on listing pages. Directify's live output includes canonical tags, which Listable's currently doesn't. Neither difference will decide whether you rank. Your niche selection and your content will.
Does Listable work with Claude or other AI assistants?
Yes, through an MCP server on the Growth plan and above. It exposes the full REST API, so an assistant can build pages, edit menus, change themes and manage SEO settings, not just add listings.
Final point: building. adirectory is OP in 2026. If you want a free guide that shows you how to get started building profitable directories, grab it here.
Prices and features verified on September 5, 2026 from get-listable.com and directify.app. My Listable link is an affiliate link and my Directify link carries a tracking code. I wrote the cons for both products before I wrote the recommendation.
Hey, I'm Andrew. I moved to Lisbon, Portugal from Nova Scotia, Canada. Follow my journey here.
I am certified with Claude and Claude Code. I am deep into AI prompting and building web apps. I am a certified funnel builder with Systeme.io. I run Reddit Ads and YouTube Ads for clients.
Read more of my articles on Medium.
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