Rules and pricing — Hype Star

Submit a project without registering and keep the basic listing free.

Catalog pages are free to browse.
Anonymous submissions start as private drafts (noindex) and enter accuracy, safety, and duplicate review. Submissions must be in English.
No user, claim, email token, order, Stripe Customer, Checkout Session, or payment method is created by the free path.
An accepted basic profile remains public without an expiry, unless it is paused, removed, rejected, or no longer meets the directory rules.
The canonical project URL and Hype Star listing—not the submitter's identity—prevent duplicate active profiles. URL paths remain distinct for projects hosted on shared platforms.
No payment, card, Stripe Customer, Checkout Session, or order is required for basic inclusion. New free listings do need a Hype Star badge on the project site; paid listings do not. Already-approved listings stay listed without one.
One canonical profile per project URL. Tracking parameters, fragments, duplicate slashes, and trailing slashes are normalized.
Anonymous submission does not grant edit, delete, ownership, or checkout authority. A later management claim requires independent verification.

01A

Richer details require current official-source evidence.

Audience, use-case, feature, pricing, integration, and platform sections are concise human-reviewed paraphrases of visible evidence on official project pages.
Each fact shows its source and check dates. Complete sections expire automatically and are omitted if any reviewed item becomes stale, missing, invalid, or detached from the project's current official identity.
Evidence excerpts, hashes, check failures, and reviewer identities remain private review records. Public source citations use rel="noopener nofollow".
These facts appear only on project-detail surfaces. They never affect acceptance, category, search, related projects, spotlight selection, API/MCP search, or recommendation order.
Pricing is source-dated information, not a quote or guarantee. Verify current price and terms on the project's official site before purchasing.
Project representatives and rights holders may request a factual correction or retirement at hello@hypestar.org.

Payment never buys relevance.

Category pages, web search, JSON API results, MCP tools, and agent recommendations use noncommercial signals such as fit, keywords, freshness, and source quality.
Payment never keeps or removes the permanent basic profile.
A promotional purchase may place a project in a separately labeled web showcase such as “Featured · paid.”
Paid or featured status is never blended into organic scores, result order, match reasons, editor picks, or related-project recommendations.
No listing or promotion guarantees traffic, leads, indexing, endorsement, or an SEO result.

Permanent free inclusion. Commercial inventory only when enabled.

Reviewed basic directory listing: FREE

Basic inclusion never enters Stripe. New founding or paid enhancements appear only when their server-owned availability flag is enabled. Optional checkout requires a verified listing manager and every paid order activates only after a verified webhook.

Existing reserved grants and paid orders remain honored even if new sales are closed. Enhancement terms do not auto-renew. Pausing visibility does not stop an existing enhancement clock, but ending or refunding one never removes the basic profile.

Outbound links disclose why they appear.

Community and owner-submitted directory links use rel="noopener ugc nofollow".
Paid destinations use rel="noopener sponsored" and a visible paid label.
An ordinary rel="noopener" link is reserved for independently selected unpaid editorial profiles.
Payment, a free promotion, or a supporter link never creates an unqualified outbound link.
A listing or feature does not guarantee ranking, traffic, leads, indexing, or an SEO result.

New free listings need a Hype Star badge. Paid listings do not.

For a new free listing, add the existing Hype Star badge HTML to any public page on your site. It does not have to be the homepage.
We first check the submitted page, the homepage, and a few common paths. If the badge is somewhere else, send that exact page URL. Qualified links using nofollow, ugc, or sponsored are accepted.
Paid listings do not need a backlink. Listings already approved before this rule stay listed without a badge and are not unpublished.
Providing the badge does not change moderation, visibility, outbound-link treatment, praise, or organic position. It is only the free-listing requirement going forward.

Weekly spotlights are dated, unpaid editorial collections.

Each published issue contains 3–5 current reviewed public profiles and a visible selection method, source date, publication date, and editor note.
Issue numbers are editorial reading order—not scores, ratings, votes, or performance claims.
Editorial placement cannot be purchased. Projects with active paid homepage features are excluded at publication; an unrelated listing enhancement neither qualifies nor disqualifies a project.
Payment, supporter-link status, traffic, votes, newsletter engagement, and ownership status do not choose or reorder an issue.
Published issues and their order do not change. If a selected profile later becomes nonpublic, Hype Star withholds the complete issue rather than silently shrinking or reordering it.
No issue is fabricated or automatically published merely to meet a weekly cadence.

Enabled front-page features are labeled and time-boxed.

New sales stay unavailable until Hype Star has dated first-party reach to report.
Requires a public, owner-managed basic directory listing first.
Shows a clear featured label for 30 days.
Fixed price — not ranked by spend, not an auction slot.
Applies only to a labeled web visibility surface; it cannot change categories, search, API, MCP, agent recommendations, or related-project order.

Traffic counter explains itself.

“Online” estimates eligible sessions in the last five minutes.
24-hour visitors use a rotating salted identifier.
Profile clicks dedupe the same visitor for 30 minutes.

The analyzer gathers a private source draft first.

Only a submitted public project page or an approved source/API is fetched. Hype Star does not crawl third-party directories without permission.
robots.txt is checked with an identified user agent before the submitted page and every redirect destination; requests are rate-limited, DNS lookups have a three-second deadline, and page fetches are capped at five redirects, 10 seconds each, and 3 MB of HTML.
Local, private, link-local, metadata, custom-port, and credential-bearing URLs are blocked.
Factual fields come from JSON-LD, Open Graph, title, meta description, H1, canonical link, manifest, and icon links with provenance.
Homepage metadata may seed the private draft. Anonymous callers cannot supply arbitrary public copy. A separately verified manager may later request revisions, and Hype Star may remove unsupported claims.
The public analyzer never renders an untrusted page in a browser. Submitters may optionally upload a homepage JPEG into the existing /media/listings/<slug>/ preview store; if they skip it, an optional 1440×900 preview may later be added through the isolated editorial capture process. No authenticated page is requested.
After editorial review, a public-page screenshot may appear as an independent directory preview. A submitter-supplied homepage screenshot greatly improves listing quality and is not required. Project representatives and rights holders can request correction, replacement, or removal.
Owner-supplied logos and brand kits are preferred. Unclaimed profiles use a neutral lettermark.

Safety before scale.

URL shorteners, chat invites, affiliate landing pages, parked domains, malware, phishing, impersonation, illegal content, and adult listings are rejected. Non-English submissions are not published.
Gambling, crypto tokens, medical claims, and regulated financial offers remain out of scope at launch.
Every paid front-page feature is labeled beside its title and time-boxed.
Authorized project representatives can request ownership review, factual correction, or profile removal. Rights holders can submit trademark, copyright, privacy, or asset-takedown requests.
A rejected pre-publication purchase is blocked from fulfillment and flagged for a required refund. A compliant placement already delivered is non-refundable except where law requires otherwise.

Start free. Pay only if you choose.