Which online directories make over $10K/month now?

Are online directories really making over $10K a month now?

Yes. Several online directories are making more than $10,000 a month today, although the list gets much shorter once we demand recent, credible revenue evidence.

Career Hound is one of the cleanest examples. In a recent Starter Story interview, founder Roman Lakhnyuk opened the dashboard and showed 779 active subscriptions, roughly $12,000 in MRR and $28,000 collected in the previous month. SaaSHub gives us an even fresher check because its own site currently advertises 123+ featured products at $99 a month. Even if every one paid exactly the advertised price, that works out to at least $12,177 a month from featured placements alone.

Nomads.com also remains above the line, with Pieter Levels' latest public revenue counter sitting around $15,000 a month. Psychology Today's therapist directory belongs in another league entirely: the platform currently charges US professionals $29.95 a month and says 971,000 unique users browse its US directory in an average week.

A few famous examples require more care. Cursor Directory genuinely reached about $35,000 a month, but it has since joined Cursor. Uneed eventually reached roughly $10,000 monthly revenue, although the founder himself says the original directory stalled long before that and growth came after he turned it into a launch platform.

So yes, five-figure directories are real today. What we do not find is evidence for the much broader internet claim that almost any little niche directory can easily become a $10K passive business.

Why is it surprisingly hard to prove which directories make $10K/month?

Finding online directories that definitely make $10,000 a month is harder than finding people claiming that they do.

The biggest problem is stale evidence. A founder posts a revenue milestone, somebody turns it into a case study, ten other sites copy the figure, and years later Google still makes it look current. Remote OK is a good example. Pieter Levels publicly reported $20,467 a month from the site years ago, later described a much larger business, and historical portfolio data clearly places Remote OK above our threshold. The problem is that its current revenue counter is no longer public. Saying "Remote OK makes exactly X today" would pretend we know something we do not.

There is another trap: businesses change shape. Thomas Sanlis says Uneed started as a directory, reached around $2,000 a month, then stalled. He rebuilt it into a launch platform, revenue briefly fell to $500, then climbed rapidly and eventually reached roughly $10,000 a month. Calling the final number "directory revenue" hides the most interesting part of the story.

We therefore use three levels of confidence throughout this analysis: recent founder or live-product evidence, strong current inference from visible pricing and scale, and historical proof that we clearly label as historical.

Which online directories have the strongest evidence of making over $10K/month?

Career Hound, SaaSHub, Nomads.com and Psychology Today have the strongest case today, while Cursor Directory is a recently proven example whose ownership has changed.

Career Hound gives us unusually direct financial evidence. SaaSHub lets us reconstruct a minimum from its live commercial inventory. Nomads.com has a public founder revenue counter. Psychology Today does not publish directory revenue, but its price, traffic and enormous provider base make the $10,000 question almost comically low.

Cursor Directory deserves inclusion because its founders disclosed actual revenue shortly before it became part of Cursor. Remote OK also belongs in the broader group of proven five-figure directory businesses, although we cannot responsibly attach a current monthly number to it.

Directory	Best recent revenue evidence	Confidence today
Career Hound	~$12K MRR; $28K collected in latest disclosed month	Very high
SaaSHub	123+ featured products x $99/month = $12,177+	Very high for featured-placement revenue
Nomads.com	~$15K/month on latest public revenue snapshot	High
Psychology Today	$29.95/month professional listings at enormous scale	Extremely high that it is far above $10K
Cursor Directory	~$35K/month before joining Cursor	Proven recently, no longer independent
Remote OK	Repeatedly above $10K historically	High historically; current figure unavailable

Is Career Hound really making more than $10K/month from a job directory?

Yes. Career Hound currently clears $10,000 in recurring revenue and recently collected more than twice that amount in a single month.

Roman Lakhnyuk's recent Starter Story appearance gives us unusually good evidence because he showed the business rather than merely describing it. Career Hound had more than 8,000 users and 779 active subscribers. Access costs $7 a week, $20 a month or $50 a year. The dashboard showed about $12,000 MRR, while total collections in the preceding month reached approximately $28,000.

Those two numbers are different for a simple reason: MRR smooths annual, monthly and weekly plans into recurring monthly value, while cash collected during one month includes upfront annual payments.

Career Hound also tells us something useful about scale. You do not need 100,000 paying customers to build a five-figure directory. Fewer than 800 active subscribers can do it when users have a strong reason to pay.

The acquisition side is more surprising. Lakhnyuk said Career Hound's social content generated 11.7 million views over a recent 30-day period. So the website may look simple, but the distribution machine behind it is anything but passive.

Is SaaSHub making more than $10K/month from featured software listings?

Yes. SaaSHub's own live numbers currently imply at least $12,177 a month from featured products alone.

The calculation is unusually clean. SaaSHub currently charges $99 a month for a featured product and says 123+ products are already featured. Multiplying 123 by $99 gives $12,177.

That is a minimum rather than an estimate of the whole company. SaaSHub may have other revenue, and the "123+" figure itself tells us there could be more customers than the number shown.

The commercial logic is easy to understand. SaaSHub says more than 564,000 people visit each month to compare software and find alternatives. A featured vendor is therefore paying roughly $1,188 a year to appear in front of people who are already evaluating software.

At that price, the vendor does not need hundreds of conversions. A handful of worthwhile customers can make the listing pay for itself.

SaaSHub is probably the cleanest current proof that the old paid-placement directory model still works.

Is Nomads.com still making over $10K/month?

Yes. Nomads.com currently appears to make around $15,000 a month, even after shrinking substantially from some of its better-known peaks.

Older Nomad List figures are everywhere online. Pieter Levels disclosed $30,416 a month back in 2018. At other points, public snapshots went considerably higher. His latest visible portfolio data puts Nomads.com closer to $15,000 a month.

The decline actually makes the business more interesting. Nomads.com launched more than a decade ago, survived the boom and bust around remote work, changed its name, faced countless clones and still sits above five figures.

Its model also differs from most business directories. Cities cannot realistically buy their way onto the site, so Nomads.com charges users for membership, community and access around its location data.

A mature directory does not have to keep growing forever to remain a very good business. Nomads.com has lost a lot of revenue from some previous highs and still clears the threshold we are investigating.

How much bigger than $10K/month could Psychology Today's therapist directory be?

Psychology Today's therapist directory is almost certainly far beyond $10,000 a month; the public numbers put the threshold several orders of magnitude below the likely business.

Psychology Today currently says an average of 971,000 unique users browse its US directory every week. The monthly price for an individual therapist listing remains $29.95, according to its professional partnerships and current signup information.

At that price, only 334 paying profiles are needed to reach $10,000 monthly revenue.

For scale, Psychology Today's own media kit previously listed more than 225,000 therapists and treatment centers. Separate academic research scraping the platform found an even larger universe of provider listings, although multiple listings, inactive entries and geographic duplication mean we should not turn that count directly into paying subscribers.

We do not need to. Even 1,000 paid listings would generate $29,950 a month. Ten thousand would generate $299,500. A directory with hundreds of thousands of listed professionals and nearly a million weekly US users clearly lives far beyond the $10,000 discussion.

The interesting lesson is the price. Psychology Today does not need to charge therapists hundreds of dollars each month. At $29.95, scale does the work.

Did Cursor Directory really make $35K/month?

Yes. Cursor Directory reached roughly $35,000 a month before becoming part of Cursor, making it one of the best recent examples of a directory exploding alongside a new software ecosystem.

Co-founder Pontus Abrahamsson publicly disclosed the revenue figure and described how the site began as a three-hour project for collecting Cursor rules. Traffic quickly reached around 150,000 monthly unique users. Adding MCP discovery helped push it closer to 200,000.

The team then sold advertising, featured MCPs, job listings and company placements. Abrahamsson said ad inventory sold almost immediately when they first offered it.

The striking part was the operating leverage. The founders reported infrastructure costs of only a few hundred dollars a month while revenue had climbed into the mid-five figures.

Cursor Directory has since joined Cursor. Abrahamsson later said more than 70,000 developers had contributed to the project.

That changes how we classify it today. The $35,000 figure is solid evidence of what an emerging-ecosystem directory can achieve, but Cursor Directory is no longer an independent little directory business that we can put on a current indie-founder leaderboard.

Did Uneed actually reach $10K/month as a directory?

Only partly. Uneed reached roughly $10,000 a month after moving well beyond its original directory model.

Founder Thomas Sanlis has written openly about the evolution. Uneed's early directory eventually reached around $2,000 monthly revenue and then stopped growing. Sanlis responded by rebuilding the product around launches, effectively taking on Product Hunt.

Revenue initially collapsed to roughly $500 a month. Then the new model caught on, reaching around $8,000 in one strong period and later roughly $10,000 monthly revenue.

That sequence is more valuable than simply putting "Uneed - $10K/month" into a success-story table. The original directory did not produce the result people usually associate with the company today.

Uneed now mixes product discovery, launches and community. We would describe it as a directory-derived platform rather than a clean example of a plain directory reaching $10,000 a month.

Are AI tool directories actually making $10K/month today?

Some probably are, but we found surprisingly little strong current evidence that ordinary AI tool directories are consistently making more than $10,000 a month.

That is a useful finding because AI directories have been one of the loudest online business trends lately. Building one became extremely easy: collect a few thousand AI products, add category pages, generate descriptions, sell featured positions and wait for Google traffic.

Revenue proof has been much harder to find than traffic claims.

There are plenty of screenshots, marketplace listings and case studies describing AI-directory revenue. The problem is that many lack a current payment dashboard, a founder source or enough information to separate directory revenue from affiliate commissions, newsletters, consulting and submission services.

Cursor Directory succeeded around AI-assisted coding, but its advantage came from becoming useful during the explosive rise of one specific ecosystem. SaaSHub works because software buyers already arrive with comparison intent. Those are much stronger conditions than simply having a large database of AI tools.

So we would be cautious with claims that AI directories as a category are minting five-figure businesses. A few certainly can. Public evidence for a broad gold rush is weak.

What actually gets an online directory past $10K/month?

The online directories clearing $10,000 a month usually sit close to a decision where somebody can make or lose real money.

Career Hound charges job seekers who want better access to jobs. SaaSHub charges software companies for visibility while buyers compare products. Psychology Today charges therapists for exposure to potential clients. Nomads.com sells access around decisions about where to live and work. Cursor Directory monetized companies that wanted access to a fast-growing developer audience.

The common thread is commercial intent.

A restaurant list that people casually browse once a year has weak economics unless it reaches enormous traffic. A therapist directory can charge monthly because one new patient may repay the listing fee many times over. A B2B software directory has the same advantage when one customer is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The winners also avoid depending on a single revenue format. Ads, featured placements, subscriptions, memberships, job postings and lead generation can all work when they fit the reason people visit.

Directory	Who pays	What they are really paying for
Career Hound	Job seekers	Better job discovery
SaaSHub	Software companies	Exposure to active software buyers
Psychology Today	Therapists	Potential patient leads
Nomads.com	Members	Location data and community access
Cursor Directory	Developer companies	Attention inside a fast-growing ecosystem

Do online directories need huge traffic to reach $10K/month?

No. A directory can reach $10,000 a month with a surprisingly small paying audience when each visitor or listing is valuable enough.

SaaSHub illustrates the arithmetic nicely. With featured listings at $99, roughly 102 simultaneous customers are enough to cross $10,000. Its current disclosed count is already higher than that.

Career Hound reaches five-figure recurring revenue with fewer than 800 active subscriptions. Psychology Today goes in the opposite direction: a cheap $29.95 subscription works because the potential professional base is enormous.

Traffic volume by itself therefore tells us very little. Two directories can each receive 100,000 visits and have completely different businesses. A software buyer choosing a $10,000-a-year SaaS product is worth more commercially than somebody casually browsing a collection of free AI tools.

When we look at directory opportunities today, purchase intent is a much more useful metric than raw pageviews.

Can paid listings alone get an online directory to $10K/month?

Yes. Paid listings can carry a $10,000-a-month directory on their own, although the required customer count changes dramatically with price.

A directory charging $20 needs 500 active paying listings. At $50, it needs 200. Around the SaaSHub price point of $99, the number falls to roughly 102. A directory capable of charging $250 needs only 40.

The harder question is whether those businesses keep renewing.

A local plumber, therapist, SaaS vendor or recruiter will continue paying when the directory sends enough valuable business. Generic listings become much harder to retain when customers cannot trace revenue back to them.

This explains why niche selection matters so much. Higher-value transactions support higher listing prices, which means the owner can reach meaningful revenue with a manageable number of paying customers.

Monthly price	Active listings needed for $10K/month
$20	500
$50	200
$99	102
$150	67
$250	40

Is Google still the main way profitable directories get traffic?

Google remains important for online directories, but the newest five-figure examples show that search is no longer the only realistic route.

SaaSHub naturally fits Google because people explicitly search for product alternatives and software categories. Psychology Today also has enormous search visibility; its own current marketing says the directory appears as the top Google result for therapy seekers 96.2% of the time.

Career Hound grew differently. Roman Lakhnyuk built a large social-content operation around jobs, producing millions of views rather than waiting exclusively for search pages to rank.

Cursor Directory rode an emerging developer ecosystem. Users shared resources through GitHub, social networks, creators and community channels while Cursor itself was growing quickly.

The lesson is pretty practical. A directory still needs distribution, but Google is only one route. Social content, an existing community or an exploding new ecosystem can get a directory to meaningful scale much faster than waiting for thousands of SEO pages to mature.

Why do most online directories never reach $10K/month?

Most online directories never reach $10,000 a month because getting listings is easy while getting repeat demand is hard.

OpenAlternative gives us a useful recent benchmark. Founder Piotr Kulpinski says the open-source software directory gets roughly 70,000 visitors a month and makes about $6,500 monthly from advertising, sponsorships and featured listings. That is already a successful directory, yet it remains well below five figures.

Kulpinski's own recent review of directory economics puts small niche directories more commonly in the hundreds to low thousands per month during their earlier stages.

Uneed tells a similar story from another angle. Its directory phase stalled before the founder changed the product. Cursor Directory had the unusual advantage of arriving exactly as demand for Cursor resources was exploding. Psychology Today has spent years building a dominant position in a high-value professional category.

Building the actual website has become dramatically easier these days. The difficult work sits elsewhere: attracting people who genuinely need the directory, getting them to return, earning enough trust to influence their choice and proving to paying customers that the listing produces value.

That is why the supply of directories has exploded much faster than the supply of $10K directory businesses.

What kind of online directory has the best chance of reaching $10K/month now?

The best directory opportunities today sit inside expensive, urgent or fast-changing decisions where existing information is still messy.

Jobs remain attractive because both candidates and employers have strong incentives to solve the problem quickly. Professional services work because a single new client can be valuable enough to justify months of listing fees. B2B software works because vendors will pay to influence buyers near the point of purchase.

New ecosystems can be especially powerful. Cursor Directory did not need to displace an entrenched directory competitor; it organized information that barely existed in structured form yet. When a technology category is expanding quickly, information becomes fragmented almost immediately. The first useful discovery layer can grow with the ecosystem itself.

There is far less reason to be excited about another generic database of thousands of scraped products. AI has made that kind of site extraordinarily cheap to create.

The harder assets to copy are the ones producing the money today: buyer intent, trusted rankings, proprietary information, a loyal community and distribution.

Which online directories really make over $10K/month now?

Yes, online directories still make over $10,000 a month today, and we can verify several very different ways of getting there.

Career Hound gives us the strongest fresh small-business proof with roughly $12,000 MRR and much higher recent cash collections. SaaSHub's current commercial page independently gives us enough information to calculate at least $12,177 a month from featured products. Nomads.com remains around $15,000 monthly on its latest public founder snapshot. Psychology Today's therapist directory is clearly operating at a completely different scale.

Recent history adds two useful cases. Cursor Directory reached roughly $35,000 a month before joining Cursor, showing how quickly a directory can grow when it captures an emerging ecosystem at exactly the right moment. Remote OK has repeatedly proved that specialized job discovery can become a much larger business, although its precise current revenue is no longer public.

Uneed adds the warning. A directory can attract traffic for years without becoming a five-figure business, and sometimes the product has to evolve before the economics really work.

The clearest pattern across all of them is simple: the profitable part is rarely the database itself. These businesses own a moment when someone is trying to choose a job, therapist, software product, location or developer tool and is willing to spend money to make that choice easier or to appear in front of the person making it.

That is where the $10K/month directories are today.