Comparison
Most B2B platforms are free to join and expensive to use. This one is free to join and free to use. Here is the difference, stated concretely enough to check.
Almost every B2B marketplace describes itself as free, and almost every one of them is — at the point of registration. The charges begin later and are usually structured so that they scale with how much the platform is working for you: a paid tier to appear above unpaid listings, credits consumed each time a buyer enquiry is unlocked, a subscription to see who viewed your profile, a commission on transactions routed through the site.
None of that is dishonest, and a platform is entitled to charge for what it builds. But it does have a predictable consequence for buyers, and it is worth naming: once placement is purchasable, the first page stops being a ranking of fit and becomes a ranking of marketing spend. The supplier who best matches an unusual specification is frequently the one who never bought a plan.
The cost of a lead-credit model is rarely the headline price. It is that the marginal cost of answering a buyer becomes non-zero, which changes behaviour: suppliers begin triaging enquiries by whether they look worth a credit, and the buyer who wrote a short or badly worded message — often a serious buyer in a hurry — goes unanswered. A small exporter with a limited budget answers fewer enquiries than a large one, regardless of who is the better fit.
The cost of paid placement is subtler again. It does not merely reorder the page; it changes who bothers to list at all. Suppliers who cannot win visibility without paying eventually stop maintaining their profiles, the directory thins out in exactly the specialised categories where it would have been most valuable, and the platform’s answer to the resulting sparseness is usually another paid product.
Trade data. Shipment-level customs records, country and HS-chapter analysis, price benchmarking, port-level breakdowns and API access are the commercial product, and they are priced openly. The marketplace is not a funnel into them in the manipulative sense: you can list, receive enquiries and trade for years without buying anything, and nothing on your listing degrades if you do not.
The honest reason the directory exists is that it makes the data product better. A customs aggregate tells you a tariff line is worth entering; a directory tells you who is actually in it. Buyers who use both stay longer, and some of them eventually want the data. That is a sufficient business case, and it does not require charging a small exporter in Tiruppur for the right to be found.
No, in the specific sense that matters: buyer and supplier contact details are not sold, syndicated or released as leads. There is no advertising inventory on listing pages. The revenue comes from trade-data subscriptions bought by people who choose to buy them.
The structure is deliberately arranged to avoid needing to. A fair warning: no one can credibly promise a business model forever. What can be checked is that there is no billing system, no tier, no price list and no commission mechanism anywhere in the product today — the machinery that would have to exist first simply does not. Buy-lead responses are metered, but the meter only accepts invitations, never money.
Completeness is most of what makes a directory good, and charging is what destroys completeness. The harder problem for a free platform is quality control, which is handled with structural validation of registration numbers, duplicate refusal, email confirmation, rate limiting, a minimum-catalogue threshold and a report link on every listing.
A signup produces nothing public until three specific products are described. Registration numbers are structurally validated and duplicates refused. Submissions are rate limited per connection. Phone numbers are masked from anonymous visitors, which removes most of the incentive to scrape. Every listing can be reported.
No. Posting a requirement is free and does not need an account, and your details are not published with it. You will not receive a call from a salesperson because there is nobody employed to make one.
It is a separate paid product with published pricing, and buying it changes nothing about your listing, your ranking or your badges.
The useful question is not what a plan costs but what stops working if you do not buy one. Platforms rarely answer that directly, and the answer is usually discoverable only after a few weeks of use, by which point a year’s contract may already be signed. The checks below can mostly be run before signing anything, and they apply to this site as much as to any other.
| Ask | What a straight answer sounds like |
|---|---|
| What happens to my listing if I never pay? | It stays visible and fully functional — or it does not, and they should say which. |
| Can another supplier appear above me by paying? | Either paid placement exists or it does not. Vagueness here is itself the answer. |
| Is there a limit on buyer enquiries I can read? | A credit system is a limit even when it is not called one. |
| Is my contact detail sold to anyone? | 'Shared with partners' means sold. Ask what a partner is. |
| What exactly does your verified badge check? | A specific check, describable in one sentence. If the answer is a tier name, the badge measures payment. |
| Is there a commission on orders? | A percentage, or none. 'Transaction facilitation fee' is a percentage. |
| What is the notice period to leave? | Auto-renewing annual contracts with a short cancellation window are common; check the date. |
A free directory is not strictly better, and it would be dishonest to present it that way. Paid platforms buy something real with the money: large sales teams that recruit suppliers category by category, so their directories are denser in more categories than this one is today. Some run genuine document-based verification, staffed by people, which is more than a structural check can ever be. Some operate escrow and dispute resolution that a platform taking no commission has no mechanism to fund.
What you get here instead is that nothing between you and a counterparty has been sold to either of you. Ordering is not purchasable, enquiries are not metered, badges describe checks rather than plans, and contact details are not a product. Whether that trade is worth making depends on your category — in a thin one, a denser paid directory may simply have more suppliers, and that is a real advantage no amount of principle offsets.
The honest summary is that this platform is young and its directory is small. It will be sparse in most categories for a while. The empty states on this site say so rather than papering over it with placeholder listings, because a directory that pads itself with companies that cannot be contacted is worse than an empty one — it wastes the time of the first real buyers who arrive, and they do not come back.
A free directory suits a supplier whose product is specific enough that the right buyer will recognise it when they see it — a mill with an unusual count, a processor with a certification most competitors lack, a manufacturer who can hold a tolerance others cannot. Those businesses are systematically under-served by paid placement, because their advantage is legibility to a small number of buyers rather than visibility to a large number, and buying rank does not help with the former.
It suits a buyer with an awkward specification for the same reason. If what you need is a commodity available from a hundred suppliers, almost any directory will serve you and the denser one probably serves you faster. If what you need is unusual, the constraint is finding the few firms that can actually make it, and a directory where those firms were not filtered out by budget is a better place to look.
It suits a new exporter least well in one specific respect: there is no sales team here to walk you through building a listing, because there is nobody being paid a commission to sign you up. The onboarding is three steps and the dashboard tells you exactly what is missing, but it is self-service, and if you would rather have someone on a call doing it with you, a paid platform will provide that and it is a legitimate reason to choose one.
List your business, publish three products and see whether the enquiries come. There is nothing to cancel if they do not.