Sellular12 Free Tools Indie Developers Actually Use to Market in 2026
You are a developer, not a marketer. 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 the free options kept ending in a watermark or a subscription. They are marked. The other four are free because their owners can afford it.
Make the assets
Every directory, store page and launch post wants the same five things: icon, screenshots, short description, long description, demo video. Make them once.
PicLet
Background removal, colour replacement, borders, icons and store assets. Nothing uploads, so your unreleased screenshots never leave the machine.
- Use it for
- icons at every size a store asks for, and the 1366x768 screenshots B2B directories insist on
- Costs
- free, no account
- Disclosure
- I built this one
QuickPeek
Point it at your URL and it writes the walkthrough: AI narration, smooth animations, correct timing, under two minutes.
- Use it for
- the
videoUrlfield Product Hunt, G2 and Capterra all have and most indie listings leave empty - Costs
- free tier
- Disclosure
- I built this one
Vidlet
Auto-captions, compression, voice cleanup and 15 more video tools. Nothing leaves your device. The CapCut replacement for people who will not pay a subscription.
- Use it for
- cutting that demo into vertical shorts with burnt-in captions, the only format that travels on TikTok, Reels and Shorts
- Costs
- free
- Disclosure
- I built this one
Canva
For the one job the three above do not: a poster, a carousel, an OG image with real typography.
- Costs
- free tier, 250,000+ templates, 5GB
Get found
Sellular
Pre-fills your app across 30+ directories with each one's character limits, screenshot sizes and best submission time, then scores your site on the 18 signals search engines and AI answer engines actually read.
- Use it for
- the 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 and a visibility badge for your README
- Disclosure
- I built this one
Dev.to
A million developers, and Google indexes it within a day. Cross-post with canonical_url pointing home so the SEO credit comes back to you.
- Costs
- free. There is no paid tier for writers
Hashnode
A second developer audience for the same article, same canonical trick.
Heads up
*.hashnode.dev subdomains and pointing at Hashnode Pro. Dev.to took the identical text without a murmur. Treat Hashnode as a bonus, not a plan.- Free tier
- blog, newsletter, analytics. Custom domain is Pro
Keep the drum beating
Viral Cat
Finds content worth posting and auto-posts to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and four more on a schedule.
- Use it for
- the follow-through nobody manages by hand. One demo becomes six weeks of posts
- Costs
- free tier
- Disclosure
- I built this one
Bottled
Professional email on your own domain, with an API when you need one.
- Use it for
- collecting addresses from day one. It is the only channel you own
- Costs
- free to start
- Disclosure
- I built this one
Google Search Console
Shows which searches already almost rank you, positions 8 to 20.
- Use it for
- your content calendar. You do not need keyword research beyond that list
- Costs
- free
When it works, be ready
SparkStack
The full-stack Next.js starter behind every product here. Auth, database, payments and SEO wired up, so the next one starts at the interesting part.
- Costs
- free and open
- Disclosure
- I built this one
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 wants to pay you, which is a bad day to start reading payment docs
- Disclosure
- I built this one
The order to do it in
- Assets with PicLet, QuickPeek and Vidlet. One afternoon
- Submit to 30+ directories with Sellular. Another afternoon, and the links compound for years
- Write one genuinely useful article, publish it on your own site, cross-post with the canonical set
- Schedule the demo clips through Viral Cat so you are not posting at midnight
- Measure in Search Console, then write the next article about whatever sits at position 11
Tip
Deliberately not on this list
- Paid social schedulers. You have no audience yet. Fix discovery first
- Paid ads. Not until you know which page converts, or you burn the budget learning targeting
- PR and growth-hacking retainers. 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. Forgettable prose that ranks like it. Write from what you 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.