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Alex Cloudstar changed which project greets visitors to his portfolio: he put justship.now, a working directory of developer tools, ahead of makers.page, whose Marketing Assistant MCP was still behind early access and a waitlist when he made the choice. His case is personal and provisional: the directory offered something visitors could use immediately, but he does not present it as a permanent verdict on the other project.
What justship.now offers visitors now
justship.now pairs a curated directory for developers, indie hackers, and startup builders with a build-in-public blog. As checked October 7, 2026, its live homepage displayed 145 tools across 28 browse categories. The count is a snapshot of the site at that date, not evidence of traffic or impact.
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The categories span ideation and planning, development and building, infrastructure and deployment, and growth and operations. The browse page breaks those areas into subjects including frameworks, databases, authentication, APIs, testing, payments, hosting, monitoring, email, marketing, and analytics.
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Why he chose curation over another SaaS project
Cloudstar’s portfolio decision favors immediate usefulness. A visitor landing on a directory can browse tools without waiting for a product feature to leave early access. When he wrote, makers.page’s Marketing Assistant MCP was still behind early access and a waitlist. That timing explains the front-door choice; it does not establish that the directory is a stronger business or that makers.page has no future value.
His underlying argument is about trust and editorial responsibility. A curated list grows more slowly than an open directory, but its maintainer makes a judgment about what belongs. Cloudstar puts the trade-off plainly: “Curation is slower and it’s the only version of this that I’d trust enough to send a friend to.” That is his personal standard, not an independent measure of directory quality.
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How the discovery models differ
Cloudstar frames the alternatives as serving different discovery needs. The distinctions below summarize his comparison rather than making a universal assessment of each platform.
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|---|---|---|---|
| justship.now’s curated directory | Cloudstar says he has used or directly checked listings and personally reviews suggestions. | Slower, selective growth; the live site displayed 145 tools and 28 categories on October 7, 2026. | An ongoing, opinionated shortlist for finding tools. |
| GitHub “awesome” lists | Community-maintained rather than selected by one directory editor. | Depend on continuing community maintenance, in Cloudstar’s account. | Community-built collections. |
| Crowdsourced directories such as PeerPush and 1000.tools | Community submissions shape listings. | Organized by category and open to contributions, as Cloudstar describes them. | Broader community discovery. |
| Product Hunt | Not presented by Cloudstar as an evergreen editorial shortlist. | Oriented toward launch-day discovery in his comparison. | Finding products around launch time. |
The practical choice depends on what a visitor needs: an individual editor’s judgment, a community-maintained collection, broad submission-based discovery, or attention around a launch. A curated directory can reduce the effort of sorting options, while its selectivity also means it cannot promise the breadth of a more open catalog.
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What the changing tool count does—and does not—mean
The published counts conflict. Cloudstar’s August 30, 2026 essay describes well over a hundred tools and its FAQ says 300+. His August 31 HackerNoon republication says “Just over 300.” The live homepage instead showed 145 on October 7, 2026. Because the figures are not reconciled, the current site count is the most useful present-tense description; the older numbers should not be combined with it or treated as a verified growth trend.
Likewise, the size of the directory says nothing by itself about how many people use it or whether being listed produces business results. The available accounts do not establish referral traffic, conversions, revenue, or a measured SEO effect. On the question of search rankings, Cloudstar’s essay points readers to a separate article, but the material here does not substantiate a lift from listing.
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A portfolio choice, not a permanent verdict
Putting justship.now first is a choice about what Cloudstar can offer a visitor at this moment: a usable catalog rather than a feature still waiting behind early access. He explicitly leaves room to revisit that order. The directory’s value proposition is curation and immediate browsing, not demonstrated SEO gains or proof that one project will outperform another.
The live site says suggestions are reviewed by a person and that there is no fee for a listing or paid placement. The reviewed pages do not establish affiliate participation, referral tracking, or commissions, so they do not support treating vendor referrals as a proven revenue model.
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