After using a few directory submitters myself and also doing it manually, I would have to agree doing it manually produces better results. It sucks to have to do it manually, but at least your approval rate will be much higher since you can see whether or not the directory is even approving links. With most directory submitters, you never see the site you're submitting to, so you have no idea. But as I mentioned before, I'm still not sure directory links affect your SERP in Google as much as it used to.
I recommend you continue doing it manually, use of automated means could get you penalised if not de listing your website completely from search engines
directorybot and all their bots work well and won't lighten your wallet. You could buy several incansoft bots for what some of these other bots cost. Also to the rest. I have been doing this for some time and I see no advantage whatsoever submitting manually unless you like the process of submission or typing or have nothing better to do with your time. You may have even had a bad experience with outdated software with an old database where most submissions failed. Yes just about all submitters may mess up a submission or here and there but it is nothing that often can't be resolved by making a note of it and going back and doing those few manually.
Here's a free submitter that I just found online named Fast Directory Submitter... I don't know if this has been shared already in this forum but here u go... Here's the site: fastdirectorysubmitter.com/downloads.html
If you want to be in the race then you will have to mass submit and to save weeks of work for a reasonable price is not a bad deal.
I have an adult site and I tried the free version of Fast Directory Submitter and it worked great. So I purchased a copy for one website for less than 16 bucks (search the Internet for a coupon so that you can get it for less than 20 bucks.) I'm up to 350 submissions so far and there's over 1900 directories available. Some directories are in foreign languages so it's difficult to tell which category to select and some are niche directories (dentists, for example) but overall this is a fantastic tool that saves you hours and hours of time. Not only in submitting your sites but also in just having a comprehensive list of directories at your fingertips. I literally tried about 8-10 other software programs and none of them worked at all. One looked fairly good but it was over 100 dollars to purchase and even their demo was buggy and tech support didn't help. This software's tech support has gotten back to me twice within 12 hours -- and always solved my problem. Best product on the market, in my opinion! One tip: Do the manual submission process and submit to about 50 directories per day. It looks more natural to the SEs. And also come up with several titles and descriptions for your site -- again, more natural. They have a free downloadable ebook about SEO that is a fast and helpful read, too.
If you want to save time then go with autofillers like roboform and u can submit more than 200 directory in a day.
I also do directory submissions all manually but not more than 100 a day as if you submit a lot together and get approval of the all on same time then it may seem illegal to search engines.
Yes, if you don't have time to build links on your own hire some specialists and they will do the job for you relatively cheap.