Indiehunt
Launch your product on Indiehunt to get discovered by indies
People ask me if Free is enough on a weekly board or if they should just pay the $19. I run IndieHunt so I will be blunt about what the money buys and what it does not.
Free on IndieHunt: badge required, nofollow by default, 15 slots a week, top-3 Free can earn dofollow. You still get the Monday 8:00 AM UTC start and seven days on the homepage. That is real. Premium is $19 one-time: guaranteed dofollow, site-wide ads while you are live, SEO launch blog, Launch Kit (9 PNGs), social promotion, and you are not fighting the free slot cap. BLP Index puts IndieHunt at 60. SideHunt and MakerHunt use the same Free / ~$19 Premium pattern for different niches. Aura++ Premium is a different price band ($29 / $69 on the BLP page) because it is the daily board with a stronger SEO story.
What Premium does not buy: Product Hunt volume. PH top-3 can still mean 5k to 15k visits; outside top 10 often under 500. A $19 weekly dofollow will not fake that. What it does buy is a clearer SEO outcome you can inspect, and less lottery on whether a free slot is open that Monday.
My practical rule from ops: if you are testing the pitch and the product is still messy, Free is fine. If you already know the one-liner and you care about a lasting dofollow URL in the Hunt network, Premium is the boring correct choice. Same week, do not also Premium every sibling board (EarlyHunt, MakerHunt, SideHunt) unless niches truly differ. One weekly room is usually enough.
Full Free vs Premium breakdown lives on IndieHunt pricing if you want the current rules before you submit. Curious how other founders decide. Do you default Free until the pitch survives comments, or pay first for the backlink?
Most indie SaaS launches I watch are built around one loud day. That works when you already have people ready at 8am. I did not. Refreshing a 24-hour board while also trying to fix the one-liner is a special kind of useless busy. So I started running a Monday to Monday week on purpose.
IndieHunt goes live Monday 8:00 AM UTC and keeps the product on the homepage for 7 days. Free is $0, badge required, nofollow by default, 15 free slots a week, and the top-3 Free listings can earn dofollow. Premium is $19 one-time: guaranteed dofollow, site-wide ads while you are live, an SEO launch blog, Launch Kit with 9 PNGs. On the BLP Index IndieHunt sits at 60. Uneed is a daily board at 70. Peerlist is weekly at 66. Different fairness and reach tradeoffs. Not clones of each other.
The point of the week is not replace Product Hunt. It is room to reply to real comments, rewrite the tagline after you see what people misunderstand, and still keep a lasting URL after the heat drops. On a spike day I was too busy staring at rank to actually talk. On a 7-day board I get conversations that change the landing page before I burn a bigger day.
I still use short spike days when warm traffic is lined up. For cold indie SaaS and AI tools, the week has been the better feedback loop. If you want the live board and Free vs Premium rules, IndieHunt is where I run that experiment every Monday UTC.
Has a full week on a homepage ever beaten your one-day launch for useful feedback, or do you still prefer the spike?
I keep a simple rule for weekly boards now. Pick ONE room that matches the buyer. Do not stack IndieHunt, MakerHunt, and SideHunt in the same month and call it a strategy.
IndieHunt is for indie SaaS and AI tools. MakerHunt is for makers who actually try products. SideHunt is for side projects. EarlyHunt is the AI angled weekly. Aura++ is the daily board in the same Hunt network. Uno Directory is evergreen listing, not a competition week.
On Product Hunt Alternatives I only score launch boards, not every directory pretending to be Product Hunt. There are 59 alternatives plus Product Hunt as the baseline. Weekly AI and indie rooms usually land in the high 60s on that scoring. Peerlist often leads weekly alternatives because the professional network is part of the pitch.
Practical takeaway from running these boards and ranking the rest: one weekly room for attention, one daily warm-up if you need it, Product Hunt later if the copy is ready. Write unique descriptions for each form. Same facts, different angle. Three to six real events. Stop when the next board is just another clone and you have no unique copy left.
What buyer are you optimizing for this month, and which single weekly room matches it?
Most indie SaaS launches I watch are built around one loud day. That works if you already have an audience ready at 8am. A lot of us do not. So I started running a Monday to Monday week on purpose.
IndieHunt starts Monday 8:00 AM UTC and keeps the product on the homepage for 7 days. Free is $0 with a badge required, nofollow by default, and 15 free slots a week. Top-3 Free can earn dofollow. Premium is $19 one-time: guaranteed dofollow, site-wide ads while you are live, an SEO launch blog, and a Launch Kit with 9 PNGs.
The point of the week is not replace Product Hunt. It is room to answer real questions, rewrite the one-liner after people misunderstand it, and keep a lasting URL after the heat drops. On a 24 hour spike I was usually refreshing rankings more than talking to users. On a 7 day board I actually talk to people.
On the BLP Index IndieHunt sits around 60. Uneed as a daily board is around 70. Peerlist weekly is around 66. Different fairness and reach tradeoffs. Not copies of each other.
I still use short spike days when warm traffic is lined up. For cold indie SaaS, the week has been the better feedback loop. Free vs Premium rules and the live board are on IndieHunt if you want the exact details.
Has a 7 day room ever beaten your one day launch for useful feedback, or do you still prefer the spike?
I keep seeing people use every launch board like it is Product Hunt. That does not really work. A weekly board is a different thing, so I wrote down the actual IndieHunt rules instead of just talking about exposure.
The launch starts Monday at 8:00 AM UTC and stays on the homepage for 7 days. Free has 15 slots each week. You need the badge, and the link is nofollow by default. A Free launch that finishes top-3 can earn dofollow, but you have to get there. Premium is $19 one time. It guarantees dofollow and includes the Launch Kit with 9 PNGs, site-wide ads for that week, an SEO launch blog, and social promo.
That makes the choice pretty simple. If the main thing you want is a lasting backlink, Free is a bet on reaching top 3. If you want to test your copy and get comments for a week before a bigger launch, Free may be enough. Premium makes more sense when the guaranteed link and the extra assets are worth $19 to you.
I score launch boards in Product Hunt Alternatives, not general directories. The list has 59 alternatives, with Product Hunt as the baseline. IndieHunt comes out around 68 overall as a weekly AI and indie room. Peerlist Launchpad is the weekly leader at 79, helped by its professional-network angle.
My advice is pick one room that fits the buyer. Indie or AI can use IndieHunt or EarlyHunt, makers can use MakerHunt, and side projects can use SideHunt. Three Hunt-network weeks in one month is not a strategy. What do you want most here: backlink, feedback, or a traffic spike?
Looking through indie tools for IndieHunt, the ones that stick aren't the longest feature lists. First line says who it's for. Second line says what pain dies. Feature dumps get scrolled past hard.
If you're writing a listing right now — do you lead with features or the job it does?
You ship. You hit the leaderboard. Next morning the homepage is a different set of products and your traffic is gone.
What actually worked for me wasn't a bigger launch day. It was treating launch as a week, not a day.
A weekly board gives you time to watch which headline people click, fix the one-liner, answer the same 5 questions, then do the one-day launch with assets that already got tested.
That's why IndieHunt runs Monday to Monday. Homepage for 7 days, not 24 hours.
Do you launch once and hope, or do you run a sequence?
A launch doesn't have to be a single day.
The usual playbook is:
Build → launch → hope people show up.
But there are so many smaller launch opportunities that it can make more sense to build a sequence.
For example:
Week 1: Pre-launch platform
Week 2: Weekly launch board
Week 3: Niche platform relevant to your audience
Week 4: Another launch/community opportunity
Later: Product Hunt
Each launch becomes a small experiment.
You can learn:
→ Which audience actually cares
→ Which headline converts
→ Which screenshots work
→ What questions people ask
→ Where your traffic comes from
→ Which platforms are worth repeating
That thinking is what led me to build Product Hunt Alternatives:
https://producthunt-alternatives.com/
The site ranks 59 alternative launch platforms and helps founders choose based on audience, SEO, ease, community, cost, and traffic potential.
The bigger idea is:
Don't ask “Where should I launch?”
Ask:
“What should my launch sequence look like?”
How do you approach launches for your products?
When you're building as an indie hacker, "where should I launch?" sounds like a simple question.
It's not.
I started researching launch platforms because I kept seeing the same advice everywhere: Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit, repeat.
Those platforms can absolutely be useful, but there are many other launch boards, beta platforms, communities, directories, and product discovery sites that founders rarely talk about.
So I started compiling them.
I ended up researching 70+ platforms and comparing things like:
Traffic / reach
Audience intent
Submission requirements
Backlink and evergreen value
Fairness for new products
AI visibility
Ease of launching
I turned the research into Best Launch Platforms, an independent ranking and comparison resource.
One thing that stood out to me: the platform with the most traffic isn't necessarily the best platform for your product.
A developer tool might get more useful feedback from a smaller technical community than from a huge general audience.
A pre-launch product might be better off building a waitlist before doing a major launch.
And some platforms are much more useful for long-term discovery than for launch-day traffic.
I'm curious what other IH builders have experienced:
What's the most underrated place you've launched a product?
Not necessarily the biggest source of traffic — just the place that gave you surprisingly good users, feedback, or exposure.
I used to think launching was enough.
It wasn’t.
For me the shift was: go where founders already hang out, help them first, and let word of mouth do the rest.
Wrote / recorded the full thing here:
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