Show HN: Startfa.st – A curated, fast directory of AI, dev, and product tools
by shdalex | 2025-11-18 12:00:20+00:00
Hi HN! I’ve been building startfa.st, a curated directory of AI, developer, and product tools. Link: https://startfa.st

Like many people building in AI/dev, I found myself drowning in new tools every day, everything from agents, deployment frameworks, auth platforms, workflow engines, model APIs, automation tools, design tools, security stacks, etc. There’s constant novelty, but it’s very hard to find signal. Most lists on the internet recycle the same names.

So I built startfa.st to solve my own discovery problem.

What startfa.st is

A fast, searchable, hand-curated index of tools across categories including:

Development Tools

AI Agents

Automation Tools

Security Tools

Integrations & APIs

No-Code

Video / Design / Content Tools

Learning Tools

Finance / Analytics

And more (18+ categories total)

Each product has: a short manual description 4–6 tags for filtering category placement highlights (popular, rising, underrated) clean link out to the tool

There are 500+ tools so far, and I add new ones daily.

Why I built it

A few reasons:

Every day 10 new AI tools launch, and 7 of them die Early discovery is useful, but most places surface the same 20–30 tools.

Twitter/X lists are noisy They’re good for hype, bad for structured discovery.

DevTools & AI tooling are becoming deeply fragmented For example, discovering tools like Inngest, Arcjet, Clerk, Temporal, Baseten, Trigger.dev, CrewAI, etc. requires knowing where to look.

OpenAI/Google/Anthropic overshadow everything I wanted a home where great tools still get visibility even if they aren’t the top model vendors.

I needed it for my own workflow I use this daily to prototype, compare stacks, test tools, and build things.

So this is partly a personal tool that grew into something larger.

What’s technically interesting

The entire collection is hand-curated (no scraping, no auto-import).

Every entry is manually categorized, no model hallucinations.

The UI is intentionally lightweight and fast (I want it to load instantly).

Tags + categories are normalized to let you filter by capability (“LLM”, “auth”, “workflows”, “vector search”, “RAG”, “deployment”, etc).

I’m working on full-text search (across tags, categories, and descriptions).

I’m considering a structured API if enough people want it.

Even though it’s a simple concept, the hard part is editing and curation.

What’s unique / different

No hype, no affiliate links, no auto-generated garbage.

Everything is manually vetted. If a tool is bad, buggy, or spammy, I skip it.

I highlight rising or underrated tools, not just the obvious majors.

It’s extremely fast and minimal, no bloat.

Tools are categorized by what builders actually care about (auth, agents, workflows, LLM infra, deployment, etc.).

What’s upcoming

Full-text search

Maker pages (like IndieHackers but cleaner)

Collections (e.g. “AI video stack”, “Tools for indie hackers”, “DevOps AI”)

Trending / upvotes

Ability to filter by tech (Python, JS, Go, cloud, etc.)

A weekly digest of new tools

Public API

“I use this” badges (opt-in)

If any of these matter to you, I’d love to know which ones to prioritize.

Feedback I’m looking for from HN

Is the categorization useful? What’s missing?

Should entries include pricing, screenshots, or feature lists?

Would a public API be valuable?

Are there tools I’m overlooking that deserve inclusion?

Any UI/UX simplifications you’d recommend?

I’m happy to answer anything in the comments.

Link

https://startfa.st

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any feedback.

Happy to iterate quickly based on what HN suggests.