Launch guide
Where to Launch Your Product: Every Launch Platform and Startup Directory, Compared (Updated Monthly)
The best places to launch a product in 2026 are Product Hunt, Hacker News (Show HN), Uneed, Toolfound, BetaList, and niche Reddit communities like r/SideProject — sequenced over 2–4 weeks rather than blasted in one day. Below is every launch platform and startup directory, compared on launch model, dofollow backlinks, and cost.
Last updated August 2026
The comparison table
31 platforms, one row each. Where we could not verify a value from the platform’s own pages, the cell shows a dash instead of a guess. Toolfound publishes this table and is a row in it — the methodology section explains how the facts are sourced.
| # | Platform | Best for | Launch model | Dofollow link | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product Hunt | Consumer and prosumer products with a polished story | Daily ranking | Conditional | Free | Dofollow only for top products of the day; a lottery without an existing audience |
| 2 | Hacker News (Show HN) | Technical products with something genuinely interesting to show | Community | — | Free | The prize is traffic and feedback, not links; read the Show HN rules first |
| 3 | Uneed | Indie makers who want a calmer daily board with a real link policy | Daily ranking | Yes | Free + paid skip-the-line | Smaller than the biggest boards but launches are less crowded, so odds are better |
| 4 | ToolfoundOur platform | Agent-native launches and a permanent, dofollow directory listing | Daily ranking | Yes | Free (first 100 launches), then paid skip-the-line | Our platform — mandatory ownership verification, public queue and launch dates |
| 5 | BetaList | Pre-launch startups collecting early adopters before the public launch | Evergreen listing | Yes | Paid | Submissions are paid; dofollow on acceptance; strongest before you launch, not after |
| 6 | Reddit — r/SideProject | First honest feedback on a side project, before any formal launch | Community | — | Free | Come for feedback, not links; read the self-promotion rules of the sub first |
| 7 | Reddit — r/SaaS | SaaS founders sharing build-in-public updates and launch recaps | Community | — | Free | Recaps with real numbers outperform launch announcements here |
| 8 | Indie Hackers | Story-driven launches and milestone posts to an audience of founders | Community | — | Free | The forum thread is the value; product pages matter less than they used to |
| 9 | SaaSHub | An evergreen alternatives-style listing that compounds through search | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free + paid options | Free dofollow listing; value accrues slowly via alternatives pages, not launch spikes |
| 10 | AlternativeTo | Being discovered by people searching for alternatives to incumbents | Tool database | Yes | Free | Crowd-moderated; your listing gains from being an alternative to something big |
| 11 | G2 | B2B social proof once you have real customers who will leave reviews | Review site | No | Free profile + paid plans | Not a launch venue; a review moat you start building after you have customers |
| 12 | Capterra | SMB software buyers comparing categories; PPC once budget exists | Review site | No | Free listing + paid ads | Free listing gets buried without paid placement; strongest in established categories |
| 13 | Fazier | Indie-friendly daily launches with an active maker community | Daily ranking | — | Free + paid options | Newer board that grew fast among makers; smaller audience, better odds |
| 14 | Microlaunch | Micro-SaaS and small products competing over a month, not a day | Monthly ranking | — | Free + paid options | Month-long launch window suits products without a day-one audience |
| 15 | Peerlist | Developers and designers launching to a professional-profile network | Weekly ranking | — | Free | Weekly launchpad inside a professional network; strong for dev-adjacent products |
| 16 | DevHunt | Dev tools launching to developers, run by dev-tool makers | Weekly ranking | — | Free | Open-source, niche by design; small audience but exactly the right one for dev tools |
| 17 | Startup Stash | A listing inside a long-running directory of startup tools and resources | Tool database | — | — | Resource directory rather than a launch board; browsed by founders kitting out their stack |
| 18 | AppSumo | Lifetime-deal revenue and a large deal-hunting audience | Deal marketplace | — | Revenue share | A sales channel, not a listing; buyers expect deep-discount lifetime deals |
| 19 | Crunchbase | Entity presence for investors, journalists, and AI knowledge graphs | Tool database | No | Free profile + paid plans | Nobody discovers you here, but everyone checks you here; profile is table stakes |
| 20 | F6S | Startup programs, accelerator applications, and founder deals | Tool database | Yes | Free | Free dofollow profile; the real product is program applications and startup deals |
| 21 | There's An AI For That | AI tools reaching a large, AI-curious consumer audience | Tool database | — | — | One of the largest AI directories; verify current submission pricing on their site |
| 22 | Futurepedia | AI tool discovery among a directory-first audience | Tool database | — | — | Large AI directory with newsletter and video reach; check current submission terms |
| 23 | Toolify | AI tool listing in one of the largest AI directories by page count | Tool database | — | — | Massive index with rankings by traffic and category; depth varies per page |
| 24 | Launching Next | A quick, free evergreen listing among thousands of new startups | Evergreen listing | Yes | Free | Low effort, free dofollow listing; modest traffic, part of the checklist tier |
| 25 | StartupBase | Community feedback and an evergreen startup profile | Community | — | Free | Smaller maker community; the profile persists and the room is friendly |
| 26 | SideProjectors | Showing — or selling — a side project to other makers | Deal marketplace | — | Free | Half showcase, half marketplace for buying and selling side projects |
| 27 | Betabound | Recruiting structured beta testers before a public launch | Community | — | Free | A beta-tester community, not a launch venue; useful strictly pre-launch |
| 28 | KillerStartups | A write-up in a long-running startup blog-directory hybrid | Evergreen listing | — | — | Editorial-style startup coverage; verify current submission terms on their site |
| 29 | Startup Buffer | Simple evergreen directory listing for early-stage startups | Evergreen listing | — | Free + paid options | Straightforward directory; free tier with paid expedited options |
| 30 | PitchWall | Daily startup showcase with community upvotes | Daily ranking | — | Free + paid options | Small daily board in the familiar format; friendly to first-time launchers |
| 31 | 10words | A ten-word pitch in front of a daily newsletter audience | Newsletter | — | Free | Describes startups in exactly ten words; the constraint is the product |
Every platform, one by one
The table answers “which”; these sections answer “when and how”. Each entry links to the platform’s own submit or FAQ page — the primary source — and states the trade-offs as plainly as we can.
1. Product Hunt
Still the biggest general launch board, and still the one your investors will ask about. Successful launches report anywhere from a couple of thousand to over ten thousand visits in a day — but the median launch gets a small fraction of that, and without an existing network the front page is close to a lottery. The mechanics have flattened: hunters matter far less than they used to, and the work is in your first comment, your gallery, and having real users show up before noon. The listing link is nofollow by default and becomes dofollow only for top products of the day. Treat it as the finale of a launch sequence, not the opener: launch here after you have practised the pitch on smaller boards and have users who will genuinely comment.
2. Hacker News (Show HN)
The highest-variance option on this list. A Show HN that lands can outdraw every other platform here combined, and the comment thread will contain the most technically literate feedback you will ever get for free. But the audience has no patience for marketing language, growth hacks, or launches with nothing to try — read the Show HN rules before posting, because they are enforced. What works: a working demo, a plain-spoken title, a first comment explaining what is hard about the problem, and answering every question fast without defensiveness. What fails: relaunching repeatedly, engagement bait, and asking friends to upvote (voting-ring detection is real). Go here when the product is technical and genuinely works; skip it if your pitch depends on a landing page.
3. Uneed
A daily launch board run by an indie maker, and one of the platforms that popularised publishing its own launch-directory comparisons — which tells you the team understands why founders come: traffic, feedback, and a dofollow link. The daily competition is far less crowded than the biggest boards, so a good product with a small push has a real shot at the top spots, and listings persist afterwards. The free queue can mean a wait of weeks; the paid skip-the-line option exists if your date matters. The audience skews indie-maker and early-adopter, so B2B products with long sales cycles get less from it than consumer tools do. A sensible week-two launch: big enough to matter, small enough to win.
4. Toolfound
Toolfound is our platform, so read this entry knowing that. What it does differently: the entire launch lifecycle — submit, verify, track, claim — works over MCP as well as the web, so your agent can run the launch; ownership verification is mandatory for every listing; and the queue is public, so you see your exact launch date and position before you commit. Every listing keeps a permanent page with a free dofollow link — never conditioned on a badge or a link back, which is written policy, not a promise. The honest trade-off: the audience is newer and smaller than the incumbents above and below it in this table. The first hundred launches are free, and the counter is public. If you want the biggest possible day-one spike, launch elsewhere first and here for the durable page.
5. BetaList
One of the oldest names in the space, focused on a moment most boards ignore: before your public launch. The audience is early-adopter subscribers who sign up for betas, so the useful output is waitlist signups rather than a traffic spike. Know two things going in. First, submissions are paid now — the free path has effectively given way to paid processing, and the listing link is dofollow on acceptance, which BetaList states plainly in its own FAQ. Second, the fit is narrow: if you have already launched publicly, you are not a beta and the listing will underperform. Used at the right moment — working product, pre-launch, hungry for first users — it remains one of the few places purpose-built for exactly that.
6. Reddit — r/SideProject
The default first stop for indie products, and the right one: post here in week one, before any formal launch, while you can still act on what people tell you. The subreddit is large, active, and tolerant of self-promotion in a way most of Reddit is not — provided you show the actual thing, answer questions, and write like a person rather than a landing page. Expect blunt feedback and the occasional viral thread; a well-received post can send meaningful traffic for days. Do not expect link equity — treat any SEO value as zero and you will value the sub correctly, because what it actually provides is the fastest feedback loop on this list. One genuine post beats three reworded reposts, which the community notices and punishes.
7. Reddit — r/SaaS
Where SaaS founders compare notes, and a different animal from r/SideProject: the audience is other founders, not potential users, so a bare launch announcement mostly disappears. What works is the recap with real numbers — what you launched, where, what it cost, what converted — posted after the fact. Those threads get saved, cited, and surface in search and AI answers for months, which makes this one of the highest-leverage free posts in the whole sequence. The sub is strict about thinly-veiled promotion and quick to call out fake numbers or engagement bait. Post once, with data, and answer every comment. As with all of Reddit, count the SEO value as zero and the distribution value as real.
8. Indie Hackers
The community where build-in-public was more or less invented. The durable value is a milestone post that tells a true story — how you got your first paying customer, what the launch actually returned — in front of an audience of founders who read every word. Product pages exist but matter far less than the forum; the community has been through ownership changes and activity has ebbed from its peak, so calibrate expectations accordingly. The audience is founders rather than buyers, which makes it better for feedback, encouragement, and long-tail discovery than for direct signups — unless founders are your market, in which case it is one of the best rooms available. One honest, specific post; no drive-by links.
9. SaaSHub
Not a launch board — an alternatives engine. SaaSHub's pages rank for thousands of "X alternatives" and "X vs Y" queries, and a free listing puts your product inside that surface with a dofollow link. Nothing dramatic happens on submission day; the value accrues slowly as your product appears beside the incumbents people are actually searching for, which is precisely the query that converts. That also defines the limit: if nobody searches for alternatives in your category, there is little surface to appear on. Paid options exist for more prominence. The right way to use it: submit once, early, fill the listing properly with real alternatives, and forget about it — it is infrastructure for the long tail, not an event.
10. AlternativeTo
One of the largest software databases on the web, and the canonical answer to "what can I use instead of X". Listings are free, crowd-moderated, and carry dofollow links. The mechanism to understand: your page's traffic comes almost entirely from being listed as an alternative to something people already search for — so a listing that names its big-name alternatives honestly can pull steady, high-intent traffic for years, while a listing in a category with no famous incumbent pulls almost nothing. Because it is crowd-moderated, you do not fully control the page: users add alternatives, likes, and comments, and blatant self-promotion in the wrong places gets reverted. Submit early, be accurate about what you replace, and let it compound. AI engines cite it constantly, which is worth something on its own.
11. G2
Not a launch platform at all, and it belongs in this list precisely so you use it at the right time. G2 is where B2B buyers check whether you are real: a profile with a dozen genuine reviews changes enterprise conversations, shows up in comparison searches, and increasingly gets quoted by AI assistants answering "best X for Y" questions. The free profile is table stakes; the paid tiers buy prominence and buyer-intent data, not legitimacy. Links are nofollow, so there is no SEO angle — the value is trust. The honest guidance: create the profile at launch so the page exists, then ignore it until you have at least ten customers who will write reviews unprompted. Soliciting reviews before then reads exactly like what it is.
12. Capterra
The other half of the B2B review duopoly (together with its sibling sites under the same parent company). Capterra's audience is small-business buyers browsing category pages with intent to purchase — valuable traffic, but access to it is mostly pay-per-click: the free listing exists and is worth claiming, yet in any competitive category it sits far below the vendors paying for placement. Outbound links are not the point and carry no SEO value. The realistic playbook: claim the free listing at launch so the profile exists and gathers reviews, and revisit PPC only when you know your unit economics, because clicks in popular categories are priced for funded vendors. In young categories with thin competition, the free listing can actually rank — one of the few genuine arbitrages left here.
13. Fazier
A newer daily launch board that grew quickly in the indie-maker community, with launches, upvotes, comments, and badges in the familiar format. The case for it is the same as for every smaller board: fewer competitors per day means a well-prepared launch can realistically take a top spot, collect a credible badge, and get seen by an audience that actively tries new tools. The case against is symmetrical: the absolute traffic is a fraction of the biggest boards, and the audience is heavily other makers — great for feedback and early adopters, weaker for reaching mainstream buyers. Free to launch with paid promotional options. Fits naturally in week two of a stacked sequence, alongside the other launch boards, rather than carrying the whole launch alone.
14. Microlaunch
A launch platform built around a deliberately different clock: products compete over a month rather than a day. That single design choice fixes the biggest problem small products have on daily boards — losing by lunchtime to whoever brought the bigger audience. On a monthly cycle, steady trickles of genuine users accumulate into a ranking, so a good product with no launch-day army still has a chance to place. The trade-off is the mirror image: no single-day spike, less adrenaline, and a smaller overall audience than the big boards. Free to launch, with paid options for visibility. Best used by micro-SaaS and solo makers who would rather compound quietly for four weeks than gamble everything on one Tuesday.
15. Peerlist
A professional network for people in tech that runs a weekly launchpad: projects launch across the week, get upvoted, and winners are spotlighted. Because launches are attached to real professional profiles, the dynamic is less anonymous than the big boards — your launch doubles as a line on your public work history, and the audience of developers, designers, and product people is exactly right for dev tools and design tools. The weekly cycle gives slower launches room to gather votes. Limits worth knowing: the network is much smaller than the mainstream boards, the audience skews toward builders rather than buyers, and products far outside tech find little traction. Free, pleasant to use, and a natural week-two stop for anything developer-adjacent.
16. DevHunt
A launch board exclusively for developer tools, created by dev-tool makers who felt their products got lost among consumer apps on the general boards. It is open-source, free, and runs on a weekly cycle. The entire value proposition is audience purity: everyone browsing is a developer evaluating tools, so a hundred visitors here can be worth more than a thousand generalists — GitHub stars, real trials, and technical feedback included. The constraints are the obvious ones: total traffic is small, non-dev products are off-topic and will be ignored, and momentum depends on the volunteer energy behind it, which varies. If you are launching anything with an API, SDK, or CLI, it costs nothing and lands in front of precisely the right room.
17. Startup Stash
One of the older resource directories: hundreds of categorised tools that founders browse when assembling their stack — analytics, email, legal, design, and so on. It is not a launch board; nothing spikes on submission day. The value is a persistent, categorised presence in a directory that has accumulated years of authority and steady founder traffic. That value is real but modest, and it depends heavily on category fit: a tool founders reach for while building a company fits naturally, a consumer app does not. Submission terms and pricing have changed over the years, so verify the current deal on their site before submitting rather than trusting any list's summary — including ours; the cells we could not verify are marked with a dash.
18. AppSumo
Different in kind from everything else here: AppSumo is a marketplace where you sell your product — typically as a heavily discounted lifetime deal — to a very large audience of deal hunters, with AppSumo taking a significant share of each sale. The upside is genuine: five or six figures of near-immediate revenue, thousands of users overnight, and a wave of feedback. The downsides are just as real and widely documented by founders who have run campaigns: lifetime users cost you server money forever, refund rates are non-trivial, deal hunters churn on support, and a badly priced LTD can cannibalise your subscription base for years. Run the maths on worst-case redemption before signing. It is a financing-and-distribution event, not a launch listing.
19. Crunchbase
Not a discovery channel and not pretending to be one. Crunchbase is where journalists, investors, corp-dev teams, and — increasingly — AI systems building knowledge graphs go to confirm that a company exists, who founded it, and what it has raised. The free profile is the deliverable: name, description, founders, founding date, categories. Fill it once, accurately, and it quietly does entity work for you across the web, because countless databases and AI training sets syndicate Crunchbase data. Links are nofollow and referral traffic is negligible, so there is nothing to optimise beyond accuracy. Paid tiers serve people researching companies, not companies seeking exposure — you almost certainly do not need one. Fifteen minutes at launch, then done.
20. F6S
A large, long-established startup network built around programs: accelerator applications, grants, competitions, and founder deals all run through F6S profiles, which is why millions of startups have one. For launch purposes the appeal is simple — the profile is free and the link is dofollow, making it one of the easy wins on the checklist. Beyond the link, expect little organic discovery: people come to F6S to apply to things and claim deals, not to browse for new tools. The profile pays for itself the first time you apply to an accelerator or claim a cloud-credits deal, since you will need it anyway. Create it once, keep the company data accurate, and collect the incidental benefits.
21. There's An AI For That
The best-known of the AI-tool directories, built on a simple, durable insight: index every AI tool by the task it performs, and catch the enormous search demand for "AI for X". For an AI product, being listed puts you in front of a mainstream audience actively hunting for tools, and the task-based taxonomy means even niche products get a page that matches a real query. Points of honesty: submission terms have shifted between free and paid tiers over time, so check the current pricing on their site; featured placement is paid; and the traffic skews toward curious consumers trying things once rather than committed buyers. If your product is not AI-native, this is off-topic. If it is, list it — the category's buyers genuinely start their search in directories like this one.
22. Futurepedia
One of the two big general AI directories, grown from the same 2023 wave. Beyond the directory pages themselves, Futurepedia built an audience around a newsletter and video content, so a listing can surface in more than one channel. The dynamics mirror its larger rival: strong fit for AI-native products, task and category pages that match real search queries, an audience that leans toward explorers rather than enterprise buyers, and submission terms that have moved over time — check the current ones on their site rather than trusting a third-party roundup. For an AI product the marginal cost of being listed is low and the surface area is real; for anything else it is the wrong room. Fill the listing completely; sparse entries get scrolled past.
23. Toolify
An AI directory that competes on sheer scale: tens of thousands of tools indexed, ranked by traffic and revenue estimates, sliced into hundreds of categories and languages. The breadth is the draw — long-tail category pages rank for an enormous range of "AI tool for X" queries worldwide, and a listing costs little to obtain. The breadth is also the caveat: with that many pages, individual listings are shallow by construction, and being one row among thousands in a category confers limited distinction. Non-English reach is a genuine differentiator if your market is global. Treat it as checklist coverage for an AI product — worth the listing for the long tail, not a platform to build a launch around. Verify current submission terms on their site.
24. Launching Next
A long-running startup directory that publishes a steady stream of new-project listings and syndicates them to a subscriber base. The transaction is straightforward: a free submission gets you a permanent page with a dofollow link, usually within days, with no launch-day mechanics to orchestrate. Direct traffic per listing is modest — this is the checklist tier of the ecosystem, not a needle-mover — but the effort is fifteen minutes and the link is real, which is exactly the trade the checklist tier exists for. It pairs naturally with the other evergreen directories in a single submission session during week one or two. Write a proper description rather than pasting your tagline; syndicated listings with substance travel further than one-liners.
25. StartupBase
A smaller startup community where makers post products, gather upvotes and feedback, and keep a persistent profile page. The honest framing: this is the friendly-room tier. You will not get a traffic spike, and the audience is mostly other makers, but the barrier is zero, the feedback is genuine, and the listing persists. Communities at this scale reward participation visibly — someone who comments on others' launches gets meaningfully more attention on their own — so the return tracks the effort you put in rather than the audience you bring. Worth a listing in the same session as the other evergreen submissions, and worth actual participation if the community's stage matches yours. Also one of the sources that launch-directory roundups routinely cite, which gives listings incidental discoverability.
26. SideProjectors
A hybrid unlike the rest of the list: part showcase where makers show side projects, part marketplace where they sell them. That second half shapes the audience — browsers here include people shopping for projects to acquire, alongside makers looking at each other's work. For a launch, the showcase listing is free and low-effort, with modest traffic in the friendly-room tier. The distinctive value appears if you ever want an exit for a small project: listing it for sale here is one of the few free, low-stakes ways to test acquisition interest. Standard caution applies to any informal marketplace — vet buyers, use proper escrow for any real transaction, and treat inbound offers with the scepticism unverified marketplaces deserve.
27. Betabound
A community of people who sign up specifically to beta-test products, run by a company whose business is managed beta programs. Listing your beta is free and puts it in front of testers who opt in — people expecting rough edges and willing to file structured feedback, which is a different and more useful population than launch-day tourists. The scope is deliberately narrow: this is a pre-launch instrument only. There is no ranking, no launch spike, no SEO angle; once you are publicly available, the listing has done its work. Use it in the weeks before launch if you need testers beyond your own network, particularly for consumer products where testers with varied devices and habits matter. Expect quality over quantity.
28. KillerStartups
One of the veterans of the space — a startup blog-directory hybrid that has been reviewing and listing new companies since the 2000s. The format is editorial: rather than a bare row in a database, listings historically take the shape of short write-up posts, which gives them a little more substance for search engines to index than a typical directory entry. Age cuts both ways: the domain has accumulated real authority over two decades, but the site's traffic and cultural relevance are far from their peak, and submission terms have changed repeatedly over the years — verify the current process and pricing on their site before budgeting anything. Sits in the checklist tier: a reasonable, low-effort listing for coverage breadth, not a launch centrepiece.
29. Startup Buffer
A straightforward startup directory of the classic type: submit your product, get a permanent listing page with your description, link, and category. The free tier queues submissions for review; paid options expedite and add prominence. There is no community layer, no voting, and no launch event — the entire proposition is one more indexed page describing your product with a link, acquired in about ten minutes. Directories in this tier are best handled in batch: one session, accurate descriptions, done. Individually none of them moves a metric you will notice; collectively the checklist tier builds baseline web presence and a spread of citations that search engines and AI systems use to corroborate that your product exists and what it does. Set expectations exactly there.
30. PitchWall
A small daily launch board in the familiar format: submit, appear on the day's wall, collect upvotes and comments. Its position in the ecosystem is honest and useful — a low-stakes venue where the format can be practised before the launches that matter more. Competition per day is light, so a modest push places well, and the listing persists afterwards. The constraints are those of every small board: limited absolute traffic, an audience of fellow makers more than buyers, and rankings that reward whoever shows up with a few friends. Free to submit, with paid options for extra visibility. Reasonable as an early, low-pressure entry in a stacked sequence, or as extra coverage in the same week as the other smaller boards.
31. 10words
A directory-newsletter built on one constraint: every product is described in exactly ten words. Submissions are free, and accepted products go out in the daily email and onto the site. The audience is small compared to anything in the top half of this table, but it is a genuine, opted-in audience of people who enjoy discovering new products, and the format guarantees your pitch gets read in full — a property almost nothing else on this list can claim. The exercise of compressing your product into ten words is independently valuable; more than one founder has ended up using their ten-word version as the site tagline. Effort is minutes, cost is nothing, expectations should be a trickle of curious visitors rather than a spike.
The stacked-launch sequence
The single most repeated mistake is launching everywhere on the same day. You cannot answer comments in five places at once, and every platform rewards presence. The sequence that works spreads the launch over about four weeks, each round improving the pitch you bring to the next:
- Week 1 — niche communities. Post where your users already talk: r/SideProject, r/SaaS, a relevant forum. The goal is feedback, not traffic. Fix what they tell you.
- Week 2 — launch boards. Book a date on the calmer boards — Toolfound, Uneed, Fazier, Microlaunch, Peerlist or DevHunt depending on your audience. Smaller rooms, better odds, real listings with real links.
- Week 3 — Show HN, if the product is technical and genuinely works. Bring the demo, skip the marketing language, answer everything.
- Week 4 — Product Hunt, once the pitch is rehearsed and you have users who will genuinely comment. Treat it as the finale, not the opener.
- After launch — the evergreen layer. Batch-submit to SaaSHub, AlternativeTo, F6S, Crunchbase, Launching Next and the rest of the checklist tier in one session. For B2B, start earning G2 and Capterra reviews once you have customers who will write them unprompted.
How this list is made
Platform facts in the table come from each platform’s own submit and FAQ pages, re-checked monthly; dofollow status is only marked where the platform states it or where we verified it on live listing pages. Where we could not verify a value, the cell shows “—” rather than a guess, and no traffic or authority figures are invented. Ordering reflects audience fit and reach for a typical launch, not alphabetical order and not payment — no platform can pay to move up this list.
Toolfound publishes this list and is included in it. We have placed our own entry where we honestly think it belongs, and the entry says what we are worse at. The rules we apply to ourselves are public on the methodology page.
Common questions
Where can I launch my SaaS product?
Launch on 4–6 platforms in sequence: niche Reddit communities for feedback first, then launch boards like Toolfound and Uneed, then Show HN if technical, then Product Hunt once polished. Evergreen directories (SaaSHub, AlternativeTo, G2) come after launch.
Which startup directories give dofollow backlinks?
Toolfound, SaaSHub, AlternativeTo, F6S and Launching Next give free dofollow links; BetaList's is paid; Product Hunt's becomes dofollow only for top products of the day.
Is Product Hunt still worth it in 2026?
Yes, once and deliberately. The audience is still the largest of any launch board and the badge still carries weight — but the front page concentrates most of the value, and without an existing network reaching it is close to a lottery. Launch there after practising on smaller boards, with real users ready to comment, and treat it as one day in a longer sequence rather than the whole plan.
How many directories should I submit to?
5–8 high-quality, relevant directories beat 100 spam submissions, which can actively hurt. Batch the free evergreen tier in one afternoon, put real effort into the few venues where your audience actually is, and walk away from any directory that conditions a listing or its dofollow link on a link back.
Where should I post my side project for free?
r/SideProject for first feedback, then the free launch boards — Toolfound, Uneed's free queue, Fazier, Microlaunch — then Indie Hackers and Peerlist for the maker community, and finally the free evergreen directories like Launching Next and StartupBase in a single batch session.
How to run the launch
Knowing where to launch is half the work. The other half is running the day well — written for the common case: a good product, a handful of users, and no audience yet.
Two weeks before
Book the date first. You can see the calendar on the register and your exact position the moment you submit, so there is no reason to guess. Pick a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday: weekend days have fewer voters and Mondays compete with everything that queued over the weekend.
- Fix the first-run experience. Launch traffic is unforgiving. If signup needs a credit card or a demo call, most of the visitors you get will never see the product.
- Make one screenshot worth looking at. Not a hero image with a headline on it. The actual interface, doing the actual thing, with real-looking data.
- Verify your domain early. DNS records take minutes to propagate and people always leave it to launch morning.
- Line up ten people who will genuinely try it. Not vote — try it. Ten real users on the day is worth more than a hundred drive-by clicks.
Writing the listing
The tagline is the only thing most people read. Write what the product does and who it is for, in plain words, and cut every adjective that could describe any other product. “Turns a spreadsheet of expenses into a cancellation list” beats “AI-powered financial clarity platform” every single time.
The description should run past a hundred words with something specific in it — the mechanism, the constraint, the thing you decided not to build. Listings below that threshold stay out of search results until they grow, and that rule exists because thin pages hurt everyone in the index.
The day itself
- Be there in the morning. Your listing goes live early. Answer every question you get within the hour, in public.
- Tell your existing users first. One short message to the people already using the thing, with a link. They are the votes you have earned.
- Do not buy votes and do not run a vote ring. One vote per person per tool, keyed server-side. Rings are visible in the data and get delisted.
- Post where your users already are, once each, in a form that fits the room. A launch link with no context is noise everywhere.
The week after
The board resets, the listing does not. Your page stays up with a dofollow link, so the value that compounds is the page, not the day. Add the badge if you want one — it is optional and always will be — and add the listing link to your own site’s footer or press page so the two point at each other honestly.
Write down what actually happened: visitors, signups, conversions, and where they came from. Publishing those numbers is the cheapest distribution a small product has, and it is the exact thing every other launch recap leaves out.
What not to bother with
- Badge-for-backlink schemes. Any directory that requires a link back to keep your listing is describing a link exchange. It is against every published search guideline, and it selects for the worst supply.
- Paying for placement in a ranked list. If money can move a position, the position means nothing. Sponsorship here buys a rail, clearly marked, and never a rank.
- Launching everywhere on the same day. You cannot answer comments in five places at once. Space them out and be present in each.
When you are ready, book a date. You will see the position before you commit to anything. Segment-specific versions of this comparison: B2B SaaS, AI tools, dev tools, side projects, free directories, dofollow directories and Product Hunt alternatives.