12 Product Hunt Alternatives, Priced and Checked

Somebody on your team has "launch on Product Hunt" in the calendar for next Tuesday, and nobody has asked what happens on Wednesday.

Wednesday is quiet. That's the whole problem.

There are at least a dozen places that will list a new product this month. The useful ones sort into four kinds: launch boards that copied the Product Hunt format (Uneed, Peerlist Launchpad, Microlaunch, Fazier, Dev Hunt), communities where a launch is a post you defend in the comments (Show HN, Indie Hackers, Reddit), two specialists (BetaList before you ship, AppSumo when you have a deal to sell), and two boards that rank by what you paid.

Every price below was read off the platform's own page in the first week of September 2026. The link sits beside the number.

What almost none of them will tell you is what they send.

Most publish a price. Three publish a visitor count. One publishes a live traffic dashboard anybody can open, and it's ours, so read that row with the salt it deserves.

Ask each of them the question you'd ask a billboard company. How many people walk past, and can I check?

What Product Hunt Costs in 2026

Launching is free. Product Hunt's own launch guide answers the cost question in five words: "Yes. It's 100% free to use." That was true in 2016 and it's true on 6 September 2026.

What isn't free is being seen.

A launch either gets featured on the homepage or it doesn't. The featuring guidelines (updated 10 March 2026) say the call is made on four things (is it useful, is it novel, is it well made, is it creative) and that "in the vast majority of cases, our featuring decisions are final."

There is no appeal desk.

There's no fee to jump the gate either, which is to Product Hunt's credit. It also means the outcome of your week is decided by a curator you'll never speak to.

If you want a guaranteed slot on that page, it's sold as advertising. The ad campaigns page puts self-serve display at "$5,000 - $10,000" and managed campaigns from $10,000.

What does a featured launch send? Nobody has a dataset. The most careful founder-reported ranges published, in Causo Hub's September 2026 guide, put the top three at 5,000 to 15,000 visitors, ranks four to ten at 1,000 to 3,000 and ranks eleven to thirty at 300 to 700.

Treat those as the shape of the curve, not a promise. The shape is what matters. It's steep, and most launches land on the flat part.

Do this before you book the day. Open the four featuring criteria and write one sentence saying which of the four your product spikes on. If you can't write that sentence, plan for the 300-visitor tier and spend the week on the places below.

The Twelve, in One Table

Copy this. Then check each source yourself, because prices on these sites move about twice a year.

Twelve rows. Four of them will tell you what the page gets. One will let you check.

Nine of the twelve have a page of their own set against The Board, price by price, linked from their names in the table. Product Hunt's is Product Hunt vs The Board.

The Launch Boards

Uneed is the one most founders reach for first, and the reason is on its pricing page: the numbers are there. Ninety thousand monthly visitors. Twenty-two thousand newsletter subscribers. A do-follow link and a slot you can book.

The catch arrived on 17 August 2026, when Uneed closed the free waiting line to new products because the wait had passed six months. Guides written in the spring still call it free.

It isn't, unless you were already in the queue.

Pay the $14.99 fast-track only if a slot Uneed picks, roughly two weeks out, suits you. Pay the $29.99 if you need the date to line up with anything else.

The $15 relaunch is the interesting one. It's the cheapest second bite on this list, and you should decide whether to buy it by looking at your analytics on day three of the first launch, not before.

Peerlist Launchpad is free and it runs on a week. The help centre says the window opens every Monday, and a November 2025 walkthrough adds the detail that matters: ranking is randomised for the first two days, so nobody buys the top with a Monday morning vote push.

Peerlist itself said on X that 621 projects launched there in one month. That's twenty a day sharing one page.

Submit on the Friday before. Clear Monday morning to answer every comment inside the hour.

Microlaunch has moved to a monthly batch. On 6 September the homepage showed 115 products queued for 26 September, and a Premium launch at $39 (listed at $49) that skips the queue and adds a marketplace deal slot. It claims 25,000 unique visitors a month.

If your product can sell a deal, the $39 buys a second surface (the deals page). That is the only reason to pay it.

Fazier will list you for nothing if you put its link on your homepage or footer and wait up to 30 days. Lite is $29, Premium $49, Super $149, all on the submit page.

What the submit page does not carry is a single visitor figure.

Take the free tier if a Fazier badge in your footer costs you nothing. Otherwise the $29 Lite buys a scheduled date and no badge, and you should treat the link as the product, because the reach is unstated.

Dev Hunt is for developer tools and nothing else. Its repo says listings and votes run through GitHub, which keeps the voting honest and the audience small.

The site itself publishes no price a visitor can read. One outside directory both estimates 2,000 monthly visitors and lists a paid expedite the site doesn't advertise. Treat it as free and slow.

If your product has a README, list it. If it has a pricing page and no repo, skip it.

The Communities

A launch board gives you a day. A community gives you a thread, and the thread is only worth what you put into it.

Show HN has the strictest rules on this list and the best documented upside. The post must be something people can try, "ideally without barriers such as signups or emails". Blog posts and waitlists are out, and so are landing pages.

The numbers, when it works, are real. One founder logged 3,500 to 4,000 visitors from about an hour on the front page in March 2023 and nearly 8,000 over the following four days.

When it half-works, it looks like Aidlab's October 2025 postmortem: about 500 unique visitors from HN, 6,000 page views, four inbound inquiries, no direct conversions.

Post it on a morning you can sit in the thread for six hours. Answer the harshest comment first.

Indie Hackers is free, and it's the slowest thing here by design. There's a products directory, a daily Build Board and a feed. None of them will spike your chart.

What they do is put your revenue posts in front of people who remember them. If you're going to use it, start posting numbers eight weeks before launch, because a first post that says "we launched" is a stranger asking for a favour.

Reddit is two different places. r/SideProject, at roughly 790,000 subscribers, allows self-promotion in show-and-tell form: a working product with real screenshots and a live link, no email gate in front of it. The mods read your history first.

r/startups sends every promotional post to a weekly thread and removes the rest.

Write the r/SideProject post as a build story with the link at the bottom. Comment on five other projects the same day, because the 10% rule is enforced by people who count.

The Specialists

BetaList and AppSumo each do one job, and both are worth exactly nothing if your product isn't at that stage.

BetaList is for a product that's not finished. Its support page is blunt: "All submissions are paid. There is no free submission option". You need your own domain, and if you're not selected you get a full refund within five to ten business days.

The price is on the form, not the site. Submitator read it at about $39 in June 2026.

Submit when you have a landing page and a signup form and nothing else. That's the audience, and it's the one list here where being early is the point.

AppSumo has no listing fee and never did. The partner page says "we only take commissions on sales you make". The seller site claims a 1.5 million member community, $113M paid to partners and about a 10% acceptance rate.

The cost is the deal itself: a lifetime plan, sold at a discount, with AppSumo's share off the top.

If your product has a per-seat price you plan to raise, that deal will follow you for years. If it has a fixed cost per customer and you want cash this quarter, apply.

The Boards That Rank by Money

Two of the twelve drop the vote and rank by what you paid. They're honest about it in a way the vote boards can't be, and you should still read the small print on both.

Tiny Startups runs a free weekly launchpad and, beside it, a main board where "the more you pay, the higher you rank." On 6 September 2026 the homepage put the minimum at $49 and rank 01 at $250, with the prompt to pay $260 and take it.

The listing is permanent and carries a DR 71 link. The audience claim is a newsletter of 25,000+ founders. There is no visitor count.

Then there's The Board, which is ours, so here is the disclosure in the same breath: every listing on it is a paid placement, rank is the amount paid and nothing else, and nothing on it is editorial or chosen on merit.

A listing starts at $1. Taking rank 01 costs $1 more than the holder paid. Amounts only rise within a season, and when somebody holds the top for 30 days the season ends: the standings are recorded and every amount resets to zero.

Other people can pay to sabotage a listing or protect it. Sabotage comes in four kinds. Each is timed and none touches rank. Anyone can also back a listing, and backing is public by name.

It doesn't print a "what it sends" number, and you shouldn't trust one if it did. Fathom counts the page views and every outbound click, and the dashboard is public.

Open it before you spend the dollar. If the number on it doesn't justify the price of the position you want, don't buy the position.

That rule is the only reason the dashboard is public.

Which of the two suits you comes down to what you're buying. A $49 permanent listing with a strong link is a directory purchase, and it belongs beside the startup directories worth submitting to. A $1 position on a board that resets is a bet on being watched, and it belongs beside the other places to advertise a startup where the reach can be checked.

Where the Money Goes Missing

Three failure modes cover most wasted launch budgets, and each one has a name on the table.

The first is paying for placement on a page that won't say what it gets. Fazier's tiers and BetaList's fee are both real products, and neither site publishes a visitor count. Tiny Startups' board is the same.

That doesn't make them bad buys. It makes them link buys, and you should price them as link buys.

Ask yourself what you'd pay a stranger for one do-follow link from a DR 60-something domain. Don't pay a dollar more than that for the placement.

The second is a paywall to be seen at all. Uneed closed its free line on 17 August and the queue that remains is several months deep; BetaList has been paid-only for a while. A directory with no free door isn't wrong. If a guide you're reading says either is free, though, the guide is older than the price, and so is everything else in it.

The third is the gate that looks like a queue. Product Hunt's featuring, Fazier's "featured on homepage (if selected)", BetaList's "if selected": each is a curator's decision made after you've done the work. Each is final.

The refund on BetaList softens it. Nothing softens the others.

There's a fourth, and it's about you. Every one of these boards records a spike that reads as success on the day and as nothing a week later, because the visitor who arrived from a leaderboard was hunting, not buying.

Put a UTM on every link before you submit anywhere. Judge each platform on day seven by signups, not by the graph on day one. The graph on day one is the platform's marketing, not yours.

Two Launches, One Week

You don't have to choose. Two of the boards above can be run in the same week by one person with a half-day of preparation, and the week tells you which of them earns a second dollar.

Here's the version to run for a small SaaS with a working demo.

1. On the Friday before, write the kit once: a tagline under 60 characters, a 150-word description, four screenshots at the size each board asks for, a 30-second screen recording. Add a landing page that shows the product without a signup wall. Every board below takes the same kit.
2. Same Friday, submit to Peerlist Launchpad for the Monday window. It's free; there's nothing to pay and nothing to schedule beyond the submission.
3. Same Friday, buy Uneed's Skip the Line at $29.99 and pick the Thursday of the same week. Fast-track at $14.99 would land two weeks out, which puts it outside the comparison.
4. Before you close the laptop, give each board its own link: ?utm_source=peerlist on one, ?utm_source=uneed on the other, a third for Show HN if step 6 applies.
5. Monday at nine, launch on Peerlist. Answer every comment inside the hour. Post once on X with the Peerlist link, and say nothing about votes.
6. Tuesday, if your product is something people can try without a signup, post it as a Show HN and stay in the thread for the day. If it needs a signup, skip this step rather than bend the rule; the post will be flagged and the account remembered.
7. Thursday at the hour Uneed gives you, launch there. Same kit, same replies, one post on X.
8. On the following Monday open your analytics. Read visitors and signups by source. The board that sent more than 200 visitors gets the relaunch money on Uneed ($15) or a second Peerlist project in a month. The board that sent under 50 gets nothing more from you, whatever its badge says.

The whole week costs $29.99 and two mornings. That's the entire launch budget for most of the products that need one, and the analytics on Monday are worth more than any of the badges.

If it's a bigger budget and a longer horizon, the rest of the Alternatives shelf prices the paid channels the same way. The post on cheap advertising for a small business picks up where the free boards run out.

When Product Hunt Is Still the Right Day

None of this makes Product Hunt the wrong call. It makes it a specific one.

Launch there when you can honestly say which of the four featuring criteria your product spikes on. Launch there when at least a hundred people who already like you will show up unprompted on the day. Launch there when the badge does a job somewhere else (a deck, a pricing page) that no other board's badge can do.

Consumer apps with a hook you can explain in a screenshot still do better there than anywhere on this list. A B2B tool with a dashboard and a per-seat price mostly doesn't.

Launch elsewhere when you can't say that. The boards above cost $0 to $50 and take a day each, and two of them will tell you exactly how many people came.

Pay for reach you can count.

Everything else on the calendar is a hope with a date on it.