Where to launch your SaaS in 2026: platforms, rules and prices

Product Hunt: still the default, with a catch

Product Hunt is the best-known launch site, and its launch guide is genuinely useful. It recommends launching at 12:01 am Pacific Time if you can plan ahead, says you can relaunch whenever you have a significant new iteration, and has one firm rule: “you cannot ask people directly to upvote your product.” Ask people to visit and comment instead. Launch from your personal account: the guide says company accounts are prohibited. Launching is free.

The catch is featuring. Products compete for the homepage, and in a Product Hunt community post a team member explains that the internal team decides what is featured, looking for products that are innovative, useful and not repeats of something already on the site. One founder’s account on Indie Hackers puts the number of featured products at 25 a day and describes non-featured launches as having to work much harder to catch up. That is one person’s experience rather than official data.

So the sensible approach is to launch on Product Hunt and also have somewhere else lined up. Here is what we would look at, what each one costs, and what it is actually good for.

Launch platforms at a glance

Show HN: for things people can use today

Hacker News has a dedicated format for launches. The Show HN guidelines are strict and worth reading in full. Your project has to be something people can try, you should have worked on it yourself and be around to discuss it, and it should be easy to try, ideally without a sign-up or email gate. Landing pages, fundraisers, newsletters and sign-up pages are off topic. Asking friends to upvote or comment is against the rules.

It suits developer tools, open-source projects and anything with a live demo. It does not suit a waitlist. If you post, be in the thread for the first few hours. The comments are often blunt, and the blunt ones are where you learn the most.

BetaList: early adopters who like trying new things

BetaList features new startups “pre-launch or already live”. Its FAQ is clear that “all submissions are paid” and that there is no free option any more; if your startup is not selected, the refund is automatic. Its submission notes are specific: your own custom domain over https (no app-store links, Notion pages or free subdomains), a one-sentence pitch of 75 characters or fewer that does not repeat the product name, a plain-text description up to 700 characters, an icon and at least one screenshot. Every listing is edited by hand, and a site featured in the last 12 months is refused.

Its paid plans differ by how soon you are featured: about 14 days, 3 days or 1 day. Prices appear at the end of the submission form, so we will not quote them here. The 75-character pitch limit is a useful exercise even if you never submit. If you cannot say what your product does in 75 characters, your homepage probably cannot either.

Peerlist Launchpad: a weekly cycle

Peerlist Launchpad runs in weeks. When we looked, it was showing week 43 (19 to 25 October) and warning that it accepts a limited number of projects, so book your week early. Peerlist is a professional network for people who build things, which makes the crowd more maker-heavy than Product Hunt’s.

DevHunt: only for developer tools

DevHunt describes itself as “a launchpad built by developers for developers, open source and fair”. Launches are grouped by week and visitors vote for their favourite. Tools that are not for developers are shown separately and are left out of the vote, so only bring something a developer would use. The site sells ad slots (from $89 a week when we checked), but we saw no fee for launching itself.

Uneed and the directory crowd

Uneed lists AI tools and new products and reads your page to start the submission. Its submit page advertises a “75 DR backlink”. Treat backlink promises from any directory with care: Google’s spam policies say buying links for ranking purposes is link spam unless the links are marked nofollow or sponsored. List on directories for the people who browse them, and count anything search-related as a bonus.

There are hundreds of these directories, and the honest evidence on them is thin. Alex Cloudstar’s August 2026 review recommends 10 to 15 niche directories “that have real traffic and editorial review” and warns that mass submission “adds little and can look like link spam”. A founder who submitted to over 100 singled out only a handful as useful and noted that free review queues can take “anywhere from a week to a few years”. Pick a few that match your category and skip the bulk-submission services. Our post on whether paid directory links help SEO covers the backlink side.

Indie Hackers and Reddit: write, don’t advertise

Indie Hackers and the right subreddit can send better early users than any launch site, because the people there already have the problem you are solving. The format is different, though. A post that says “we launched, here is the link” tends to sink. A post that says what you built, what went wrong and what the numbers look like tends to get read. On Reddit, every subreddit sets its own self-promotion rules. Read them in the sidebar before you post, and expect to be removed if you skip that step.

Paid placement, including pay-to-rank boards

The free options have one thing in common: you do not control the result. You can do everything right and still land on a quiet day or miss being featured. Paid placement swaps that uncertainty for a known cost.

Pay-to-rank boards are the simplest version. On Peakwyn, which we run, rank is set only by confirmed spend. A new listing starts at $1, amounts move in $0.50 steps, and raising a listing charges only the difference. There is an all-time board, a today board that resets at midnight UTC, a daily archive and 24 category boards, and one payment counts on every board it belongs to. Every placement is labelled as paid, and every link carries rel="sponsored", so it passes no search credit. The FAQ covers what you can list and how refunds work.

What a placement buys is visibility: your name and link in front of the people who visit the board. It does not buy customers, and we do not refund anyone for being outranked. Our post on whether a paid placement is worth it works through the cost-per-click maths.

A launch calendar that uses several of these

Rather than putting everything on one day, stagger your launches. Each one is a chance to fix what the previous one taught you. Here is a four-week order that works for a typical software product.

1. Week 1: BetaList or Peerlist. Smaller, friendlier crowds. Fix whatever confuses people.
2. Week 2: Show HN, if people can try the product without signing up. Be in the thread all day.
3. Week 3: Product Hunt, with a list of people you have told about it (to visit and comment, not to upvote).
4. Week 4: Indie Hackers or a relevant subreddit, with a write-up of what the first three weeks taught you.

Add a pay-to-rank placement on whichever day you most want extra eyes, for example the day of your Product Hunt launch, so people who find you there also see you somewhere else.

For a longer list of launch sites, the community-maintained awesome-producthunt-alternatives repository on GitHub is a good starting point.