Where else to launch your app

Product Hunt is the reference point the whole category copied, and the only one that does not sell a queue skip. Monetization is advertising and Promoted placements in the feed rather than submission fees. Launches go live at 12:01 AM Pacific and can be scheduled up to a month ahead, with weekly and monthly leaderboards rolled up on top of the daily one.

The listing page is the richest in the benchmark: tagline, rating and review count, followers, an eight-image gallery, a tab bar covering launches, reviews, alternatives, customers, built-with and team, threaded comments with maker replies, and the embeddable award badges that every other directory imitated.

Read the featuring guidelines before you plan anything around it. They explicitly exclude waitlisted products, directories, templates, boilerplates, podcasts, courses, reports, events, books, services, commerce and deal sites, and vaporware, and decisions are typically final. The promotion rules are equally firm: you may ask people to visit, try and comment, and you may not ask for, reward or buy upvotes.

Uneed is the closest structural match to what we are building, which makes it the most useful one to study. Its submission flow is the best idea in the benchmark: you start with no account at all, a bot pre-fills what it can read from your page, and you sign up only to save the draft. We copied that outright.

The free queue is the complicated part. Dates were auto-assigned thirty days to five months out, with the stated policy of launching more products per day rather than extending the wait. Secondary reporting says the free line closed to new products on 2026-08-17 after the wait passed six months, which leaves the two paid tiers as the route in.

The post-launch verdict is applied the day after: twenty or more upvotes keeps the listing published with a dofollow link, ten to nineteen keeps it with nofollow, and under ten removes it from the homepage and bars it from rejoining the free line. Skip the Line, relaunch and Pro launches keep dofollow permanently regardless of votes. Free submissions are moderated and can be declined, most often for a saturated category. Paid launches are never declined, which is the one policy here we deliberately did not copy.

Fazier has the best listing page in the benchmark, and it is not close. Alongside the usual description and gallery it carries a numbered Features section, a Strengths vs. Alternatives comparison block, and a Use Cases block written as numbered persona scenarios. That structure is a deliberate play for AI citation and it works, because each block is a self-contained statement a model can lift and attribute. We copied the whole layer and say so in public.

The pricing is a plan picker shown before the form: Basic free, Lite at $29, Premium at $49 and Super at $139, all one-time. The free tier is reviewed within thirty days and requires a Fazier badge on your homepage or footer, which makes it a link exchange rather than a listing. Paid tiers remove the badge requirement and add scheduling.

That badge requirement is also the site’s main anti-spam gate, and it is a reasonable one, since somebody spamming fifty directories will not put a badge on a site they do not own. Whether the trade suits you depends on how much real estate you are willing to give up on your own homepage.

MicroLaunch is the only directory in the benchmark that treats classification as two dimensions rather than one. It crosses Type, covering SaaS, web app, mobile app, desktop app, self-hosted and AI assistant, with Industry. That is the closest existing model to a proper platform axis, and it is why tag pages there read as specific rather than generic.

The cycle is monthly, which is unusual and has a real benefit: a month-long window means votes accumulate over weeks and a launch is not decided in the first six hours. Ranking is by an engagement score, and listings carry separate Idea and Product ratings from zero to five.

Pricing is one-time: free, Launch Pro at $39, Launch Plus at $79 and a Product Review and Action Plan at $129. The dofollow link is bundled into Launch Pro and above. The most interesting upsell is Launch Plus including four additional SEO pages, which productizes programmatic page generation itself and is worth knowing about even if you never buy it.

TinyLaunch runs fixed weekly periods with a visible countdown to the next window, and a homepage split into three bands: Latest Winners covering the top three, Launching Now, and Premium Launches. Because a period spans several days rather than one, votes accumulate over days, which suits products whose audience is not all in one timezone.

The link policy is the thing to understand before submitting. The dofollow link back to you is conditional on your badge linking dofollow to them. Without the badge you get the listing but not the equity, and a free launch stays nofollow unless it finishes in the top three and the badge is installed. That is a clean, clearly stated exchange, and it is also strictly a worse deal than a badge that is one of several optional routes.

Pricing is free for a Standard Launch, $39 one-time for Premium, and recurring featured spots at $30 a week for the top slot or $15 a week mid-feed. Their /directories page is a free list of launch directories and a genuinely good link magnet, which is the idea this page you are reading owes something to.

BetaList is the one place in this list that is explicitly for products that are not fully launched yet. Pre-launch and recently launched startups are its whole positioning, which makes it the right first stop for anyone whose product would be rejected everywhere else for being too early.

Two mechanics are worth copying and we did copy both. Sign-in is X OAuth or a magic link, with no password anywhere, which is the account-optional pattern done properly. And payment does not guarantee acceptance: if the editorial team rejects a startup, BetaList refunds automatically. That is the cleanest way anyone has found to charge for review without the payment becoming the decision, and it is the rule we adopted for every paid tier here.

There is no free tier any more; it was removed in 2026 and secondary sources put the entry submission around $39, with promoted options at $99 a week or $199 a month. The own-domain requirement is strict, and free hosting subdomains and app-store-only links are rejected. The editorial gate is hard and no individual feedback is given, which is the one thing we would change.

Dev Hunt is the developer-tool specialist in the set, and it is also the one we could observe least directly. Its homepage returns only a tagline to a fetch without a JavaScript engine, and its tool pages returned nothing on two attempts, so most of what follows comes from a third-party directory profile rather than from the site.

What is recorded: the free queue averages around six months, the paid entry is $49, GitHub is central to the product, and GitHub OAuth is used for both submission and voting specifically as a spam gate. That last choice is a good one for a developer audience, since a GitHub account with history is much harder to fabricate than an email address. Asset requirements are a 220 square logo and at least three screenshots.

Treat the rest as unknown. We are not going to characterize a directory’s cadence or link policy from a page we could not read, and you should be skeptical of comparison tables that do.

LaunchingNext is a reverse-chronological list of new startups and side projects with more than 45,000 entries, no votes, no leaderboard and no day grouping. Submission is free with a long manual queue that makers report as weeks to months, and $99 buys consideration within one business day.

The honest summary: it is a free permanent dofollow link from a domain with a rating reported around 52 to 54, and not much else. There is no launch moment to plan around and no community to engage.

It is also the clearest cautionary tale in the benchmark for anyone building a directory. A category is captured at submission and then never exposed as a browsable hub, so 45,000 listings produce no category pages at all. Listing URLs carry a numeric ID alongside the slug, pagination is a bare number, and the post-submission thanks page is indexed. Every one of those is a small leak, and at that scale the small leaks are the whole story.

One practical warning: the submit page sat behind a bot challenge on both of our attempts. If it blocks you, it is not personal.

We should address this one directly, because the name is one letter different from ours and people will reasonably wonder whether we are the same operation. We are not, and we have no relationship with it.

It runs a weekly cadence with relaunches on Mondays, thirteen categories that mix platform and purpose on a single axis, and the most granular pricing in the benchmark: $14 Featured, $19 Skip the Queue, $9 for three relaunch credits, $45 a month for advertising, and a $5 standalone upgrade converting an existing listing’s nofollow link to dofollow.

That last product is why this entry reads the way it does. Selling the link attribute as a line item is a link scheme in Google’s own terms, and when it catches up with a directory the damage lands on the whole domain rather than on the listing that was paid for, which means every free listing on the site absorbs it too. We wrote a whole post about why we will never ship that SKU.

One more thing worth knowing if you are evaluating it: the apex domain fails with a self-signed certificate error and only the www host resolves. There is also no published rejection policy that we could find.

The second adjacent name, and again not us. We have no relationship with it either.

It could barely be assessed. Three fetches of the homepage and the apps index returned title-only HTML, because the site renders entirely on the client. That is worth dwelling on regardless of what you think of the product: if a crawler without a JavaScript engine sees nothing, then a large share of search infrastructure and effectively every text-based AI answer engine sees an empty page. For a directory whose entire value proposition is making products findable, that is a structural problem rather than a performance detail.

From search results it is an indie app discovery platform built on a credit system, where makers fund a reward pool and users earn credits for engaging with an app. The category list is identical to applauncher.io’s thirteen items, which suggests the same operator or a direct clone. Free to start, with Pro and Launch Boost tiers whose prices we could not verify.

We list it for completeness and because you deserve to know the name space is crowded. Everything above is what two research attempts could establish, and we are not going to pad it out with guesses.