Niche Directory Starter

Own the directory for your niche. Do not rent it.

Every niche has a "best X for Y" gap: the local trade directory, the curated tool list, the regional vendor guide. Whoever owns the search-friendly directory owns the audience. Directory SaaS platforms charge monthly and keep the SEO equity for themselves. This template gives you the whole thing to run yourself.

It is a production-ready directory starter: public listings with full-text search, category pages, human-moderated submissions, and the SEO plumbing (sitemaps, structured data, per-listing social images) that actually gets a directory ranked.

SEO is the product

• Full-text search over titles, descriptions, and tags, powered by Postgres (correct, stemmed, and stable across deploys).
• Per-listing pages with JSON-LD structured data so search engines understand each entry.
• Auto-generated sitemap that includes only published listings, plus a robots file.
• Dynamic Open Graph images per listing so shared links look sharp, with a static fallback.
• Category pages that give every segment its own indexable URL.

Submissions without the spam

• Anyone can submit a listing through a public form with image uploads, but nothing goes live automatically.
• Submissions land in a moderation queue. You approve or reject; only approved listings publish, and their images copy from a private holding bucket to the public one on approval.
• User-submitted text is sanitized against XSS (scripts and raw HTML rendered inert, not just escaped), so a hostile submission can never run code on your visitors.
• Anonymous users get zero direct database access. Every write flows through a controlled server route.

Run it like an operator

• Admin console for the moderation queue, full listing CRUD, category management, and settings
• CSV bulk import with a dry-run preview so you see exactly what will be created or updated before you commit
• 3 presets (local services, SaaS tools, creators) plus rich demo data so the directory looks alive on day one
• 129 automated tests including moderation race and XSS-inertness proofs

Built for AI editing

Ships agent-ready: AGENTS.md for Cursor, Claude Code, and Windsurf, plus CUSTOMIZE_WITH_AI.md with paste-ready recipes (add a listing field, change the categories, restyle the cards). Customize without learning the internals.

Under the hood

Next.js 15 (ISR + dynamic routes), Supabase (Postgres full-text search + magic-link admin auth + private/public storage), Tailwind v4, TypeScript strict. Deploys to Vercel in about 30 minutes with the included guide.

Requirements

Supabase project (free tier works) for the database, auth, and image storage. Optional Resend account for submission notification emails. No other services required.