Sellular12 Free Tools Every Indie Developer Needs for Marketing (2026)
You are a developer, not a marketer. You would rather write code than write ad copy. The problem is that a great product with no distribution loses to a mediocre one with some. Every time.
Every tool below is free to start. Eight of the twelve I built myself, because I ship a lot of small products and none of the free options did the job without a watermark or a subscription. They are marked, so you can weigh that however you like. The other four are free because their owners can afford it.
Make the assets (before you promote anything)
Every directory, store page and launch post wants the same five things: an icon, screenshots, a short description, a long one, and a demo video. Make them once.
PicLet
Remove backgrounds, replace colours, add borders, generate icons and store assets. Nothing is uploaded, so it runs on your machine and your unreleased screenshots stay there.
Use it for: app icons at every size a store asks for, and the 1366x768 screenshots the B2B directories insist on. Free, no account. piclet.app (mine)
QuickPeek
Turn any website into a demo video with AI narration, smooth animations and correct timing, in under two minutes. Point it at your own URL and it writes the walkthrough.
Use it for: the videoUrl field that Product Hunt, G2 and Capterra all have and most indie listings leave empty. Free tier. quickpeek.co (mine)
Vidlet
Auto-captions, compression, voice cleanup and 15+ other video tools. Nothing leaves your device. It is the CapCut replacement for people who do not want a subscription.
Use it for: cutting the QuickPeek demo into vertical shorts with burnt-in captions, which is the only format that travels on TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts. Free. vidlet.app (mine)
Canva
For the one job the above do not: a poster, a carousel, an OG image with real typography.
Free tier: 250,000+ templates and 5GB storage. canva.com
Get found
Sellular
Pre-fills your app across 30+ curated directories with each one's character limits, screenshot dimensions and best submission time, and scores your site on the 18 signals search engines and AI answer engines actually read.
Use it for: the single highest-ROI afternoon available to a new product. Every listing is a permanent backlink. Free tier: 5 listings, Chrome auto-fill, visitor analytics, plus Roast My Landing Page (paste a URL, get a Lighthouse-backed critique, no signup) and an auto-updating visibility badge for your README. sellular.online (mine)
Dev.to
A million developers, and Google indexes it within a day. Cross-post your articles here with canonical_url pointing back at your site, so the SEO credit goes home.
Free. There is no paid tier for writers. dev.to
Hashnode
The same idea, plus the one thing Dev.to will not do: map your own domain to the blog, so the authority accrues to you rather than to them.
Free: custom domain, newsletter, analytics. hashnode.com
Keep the drum beating
Viral Cat
Finds content worth posting and auto-posts to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and four more platforms on a schedule.
Use it for: the follow-through nobody manages by hand. One demo video becomes six weeks of posts. Free tier. viral-cat.com (mine)
Bottled
Professional email on your own domain, with an API when you need one. Start collecting addresses on day one: it is the only channel you own.
Free to start. bottled.email (mine)
Google Search Console
Shows which searches already almost rank you, position 8 to 20. That list is your content calendar; you do not need keyword research beyond it.
Free. search.google.com/search-console
When it works, be ready
SparkStack
The full-stack Next.js starter I use for every one of these. Auth, database, payments and SEO wired up, so the next product starts at the interesting part.
Free and open. sparkstack.dev (mine)
SparkPay
Checkout, subscriptions, invoices, webhooks, coupons and referrals, with no Stripe SDK in your code. One deploy covers every app you own.
Use it for: the day someone actually wants to pay you, which is a bad day to start reading payment docs. sparkpay.dev (mine)
The order to do it in
- Assets with PicLet, QuickPeek and Vidlet. One afternoon.
- Submit to 30+ directories with Sellular. Another afternoon, and the backlinks compound for years.
- Write one genuinely useful article, publish on your own site, cross-post to Dev.to and Hashnode with the canonical set.
- Schedule the demo clips through Viral Cat so you are not posting manually at midnight.
- Measure in Search Console, and write the next article about whatever sits at position 11.
Total cost: nothing. Total time: about a week of evenings.
What is deliberately not on this list
- Social schedulers you pay for. You have no audience yet. Fix discovery first.
- Paid ads. Not until you know which page converts. You will burn the budget learning targeting.
- PR and growth-hacking retainers. They charge thousands to do the afternoon described above.
- CRMs. A spreadsheet is fine until you have more leads than rows you can read.
- AI article generators. They write forgettable prose that ranks like it. Write from what you actually shipped.
Sellular is a free visibility toolkit for indie developers: 30+ directories pre-filled, AI competitor reviews, and a visibility score that checks what search engines and AI answer engines read.