Introducing DirectoryFast AI: The Directory You Talk To
DirectoryFast is no longer a template you buy and deploy. It is a hosted directory platform you drive from your own AI chat, and the agent designs your data model before filling it.
DirectoryFast used to be a Next.js template. You bought it once for 197 dollars, you got the code, and from there it was yours: your hosting, your deployments, your dependency updates, your admin dashboard to learn.
That worked. It also had a ceiling, and the ceiling was always the same. People bought the code and never shipped, because owning a codebase is not the same as owning a directory.
DirectoryFast is now a hosted platform. One deployment serves every directory. You never see code. And the surface you drive it from is not a dashboard, it is your own AI chat.
What actually changed
| Before | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | Next.js template you self-host | Multi-tenant SaaS, one deployment for N directories |
| Delivery | You buy the code | You never see code |
| Control surface | An admin dashboard | Your AI chat, over MCP |
| Price | 197 usd once | 29 euros / month |
| What you do | You build the directory | You describe your niche |
The part that matters is not "AI writes content"
Every directory tool on the market now claims AI. Most of them mean the same thing: AI drafts your listing descriptions and your blog posts. That is a writing feature, and writing was never the hard part.
The distinctive move here is earlier in the sequence. The agent designs the data model for your niche before it fills anything.
Ask it to build a directory of gun shops. Before a single listing exists, it decides what characterises a listing in this specific space: a regulated weapon category, a flag for whether the shop accepts delivery to a partner armoury. Those are fields no generic template ships, because no generic template knows what a gun shop is. Then every listing gets validated against that schema.
The result is that entries compare instead of merely reading well. A visitor can filter, sort and line them up side by side, because the underlying data is typed and consistent rather than a paragraph of prose per entry.
That ordering also happens to be the thing keeping directories indexed in 2026. Google's March core update enforced its scaled content abuse policy hard, and sites publishing hundreds of pages that differed only by a swapped name lost most of their rankings. What survived was pages with genuine data differentiation. A schema designed for the niche is exactly that, produced by construction rather than by discipline.
The agent stays in charge after day one
Most AI setup tools are generators. They produce something, hand it over, and from that point you are back in a dashboard.
Here, the conversation is the permanent control surface. Thirty-nine MCP tools behind OAuth, which means from the same chat you can:
- publish the directory or take it back to draft
- add, correct, feature or delete listings
- reorganise categories and create collection landing pages
- write and update blog posts
- read analytics, top listings and failed searches
- open or close public submissions, and approve or reject them
- attach and verify a custom domain
"Fix the price on the Bordeaux listing" is a sentence, not a workflow.
Why instant propagation was non-negotiable
A mutation is visible on the public site on the next read, measured at roughly 0.1 seconds. No rebuild, no redeploy, no cache purge.
This sounds like an infrastructure detail. It is the thing that makes the whole model credible. If you tell your AI to correct a price and the public page still shows the old one four minutes later, conversational control is a demo, not a product. You would go looking for a dashboard, and rightly.
How the free and paid tiers work
Free directories run on a shared subdomain, and those subdomains are noindex. That is deliberate, not a downgrade.
Shared subdomains attract SEO spam. Spam on a shared domain damages every site sitting on it. Leaving them open to indexing would poison the pool for everyone, including the people paying.
So the Pro plan at 29 euros a month buys the custom domain, and therefore the indexation. Which is the only thing that turns a directory from a page into an asset. You can build, populate and test for free, indefinitely. You pay when you want search engines to find it.
What it does not do
Being straight about the trade-offs, because they are real.
- No visual page builder. If you want to drag sections around and pick fonts, this will frustrate you. Go and look at Directify or MakeADir instead.
- It assumes you use an AI chat. If Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor are not already part of your day, the interface will feel strange rather than natural.
- User-side monetisation is paused. Paid featured placement, paid listings and affiliate flows are on the roadmap, not shipped. If your plan depends on charging businesses next month, this is not ready for you yet.
- Young product. Fewer templates, fewer worked examples and fewer tutorials than platforms that have been around a decade.
If you bought the template
The old template still works and still does what it did. Nothing has been taken away.
If you would rather stop maintaining a deployment, the new platform imports listings in bulk, so moving your data across is a single operation rather than a migration project. Get in touch and we will handle the import with you.
Getting started
- Connect the DirectoryFast MCP server to your AI client. One OAuth flow.
- Describe your niche in a sentence.
- Review the schema the agent proposes, and change anything that is wrong. This is the step worth slowing down for. Everything downstream depends on it.
- Let it research and populate. Review what came back.
- Attach your domain when you want to be indexed.
Start here: Build a directory by describing it →