I submitted to six directories in one morning. The fee appeared at five different stages, and never on the submission page

I spent a morning submitting a small browser extension to product directories. Six flows, all of them presenting themselves as free at the point where I decided to start. Three of them took the submission for nothing. One of those three asked for nothing at all afterwards.

What I want to write down is not that money came up. It is where each of them said so, because no two said it at the same point, and none of them said it on the page where I decided to spend the next twenty minutes.

The six places the price was hiding

Before the form. The friendliest case. The navigation link said submit, and it pointed at a path whose last segment was the word pay. Thirty seconds of my time, and I could have known by reading the link instead of clicking it.

In the tier you did not select. A form opened with the most expensive option already chosen and a pay button at the bottom. Every field above it was neutral. Selecting the free tier changed the button, and only then did the free tier's own small print appear: it requires putting their badge on your site. The fee was a link from my own domain, which is not money but is a price.

At the last screen. Twelve fields, three of them long, no mention of money anywhere on the page. I filled it in, agreed to the terms, pressed submit, and landed on a payment checkout with my email already in the billing field. Nothing on the form had been false. Nothing on the form had been informative either.

Nowhere at all, once. One had a form on the page, took the submission, and asked for nothing afterwards. I mention it because a piece about hidden fees that omits the clean case is itself a kind of hidden fee.

In the confirmation email. One accepted the submission into a review queue, for nothing, and ten minutes later the founder wrote personally to offer a paid audit with, in his words, assured coverage. The submission was genuinely free. The coverage was the product.

In an optional step after sending. The last one accepted the app and told me, in the same sentence, that a promotion checkout was unavailable. I had not asked for a promotion. It was simply the next thing the flow does, and I only learned it existed because it was broken that morning.

What this changes about how I read a submission page

I used to check a submission page for a price and treat the absence of one as an answer. It is not an answer. Across six flows, money came up at five different stages, and the submission page was the one place it never came up.

So the test I now use is cheap and boring. Read the destination of the submit link before clicking it. Look at which option is preselected. Go all the way to the last screen before deciding the thing is free. Then wait for the email, because the offer that arrives with your confirmation is part of the product, not an accident.

None of that requires suspicion. It requires finishing the flow before writing down what the flow costs, which is the same discipline as not recording a page as published until a stranger can read it.

Disclosure

I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and writing down what happened. You can find it at blueticks.io.

Three of the six took a submission that cost nothing, and two of those three sold something afterwards. Whether either listing ever sends a visitor is a different question, and not one this morning answered. What it answered is duller and cheaper: at which of six points a fee is allowed to appear, and how far you have to walk before it does. It was six flows read to the end, which is the part I had not been doing.