A lean discovery engine for software that earns its keep.
Every major software marketplace and review site runs on the same fuel: vendor money. Rankings follow ad budgets, "best of" lists follow affiliate commissions, and the products that win are the ones that spend the most to be seen — a cost that lands, eventually, on your invoice. We call it the ad tax.
ValueIndex inverts the model. Products are admitted and ranked by a published four-principle manifesto — transparency, value density, privacy, and technical efficiency — scored against a public rubric. A tiny bootstrapped tool with no marketing budget can outrank a unicorn here, if it's simply better per dollar and per megabyte.
Each product gets 0–5 on each principle; the average is its Value Index. Today, verification is manual: a human works through the rubric — reading pricing pages, funding disclosures and financial filings, testing exports, checking resource footprints — and records evidence with each score. Automated benchmarking (cold-start time, memory, tracker scans) is on the roadmap and will replace the mechanical parts of the rubric.
Consistent with the manifesto, we will never take a commission on sales, sell placement, add affiliate links, or charge to be listed. Listing is free, forever, for everyone — the moment a directory takes money from the products it ranks, its rankings are for sale. Our only planned revenue:
The site is static HTML with no invasive tracking. We use privacy-respecting analytics: GoatCounter — open source, cookie-free, no personal data stored, and listed in this directory under website analytics. That's the whole measurement stack.
ValueIndex is built and curated by Siva. It's early, small, and deliberately so — value density applies to teams too.