Where else can you launch besides Product Hunt?

At a glance

Product Hunt itself is not in the table: it has a documented GraphQL API, and it is the platform this whole site is built around. Note that its API is free for non-commercial use — building a business on it means asking them first.

The cleanest data access of anything tested, and it is not close.

• Two separate public APIs, both open. The official one at hacker-news.firebaseio.com needs no key, no account and no approval; its documentation states plainly that there is currently no rate limit, and the docs repository is MIT-licensed.
• Tested live: a single call returned score, comment count, title, URL, author and the full list of comment IDs for a post.
• The Algolia-powered search API is the one that matters in practice — it finds a Show HN post by the product domain and returns points and comment counts with it, so a launch can be located from the product itself.
• What you give up: no ranking, no "featured" concept, no badge. Hacker News hands out numbers, not honours.

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Has a proper read API, which almost nobody writing about it mentions.

• A documented read-only API with an OpenAPI description, no authentication and no signup. The same contract is also served as an MCP server for AI agents, which is how it is advertised — so most articles miss the REST side entirely.
• Tested live: rankings came back with position, vote count and vote weight per product; a product lookup returned aggregate stats plus published reviews with star ratings and like counts.
• The terms of use forbid bots that manipulate votes or rankings. They do not forbid reading, and the API is offered openly.
• One practical gap: the plain launch listing carries no vote counts. Those live on the rankings and product endpoints, so you need the product identifier, not just the launch feed.

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Data exists, but only for the last couple of weeks — so it cannot back anything lasting.

• There is an undocumented public JSON endpoint. Asked with a JSON Accept header it answers with upvote and comment counts per launch.
• The blocker found in testing: it ignores every filter parameter. Slug, ID, page, date — all return the identical list of roughly the newest 120 launches, and a lookup by ID answers "content not present". There is no way to ask about a launch once it has scrolled out.
• At its rate of new launches that window is about two weeks. Anything built on it stops working for a given launch shortly after that launch happened, which is the opposite of what launch proof is for.
• A badge image endpoint does keep working by launch ID — but it is an image, so its numbers cannot be read, combined or kept current.
• Their terms also prohibit creating derivative works from material on the site, which is worth reading before building anything commercial on it.

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Good launch mechanics, no sanctioned way to read the results back.

• No public API and no developer documentation. What exists is the site's own internal endpoint, which does return upvotes, comment counts and average ratings per project.
• It refuses an ordinary programmatic request outright, and answers only when the caller presents itself as a browser. Reaching it from a server therefore means pretending to be something you are not.
• That is the whole verdict: the data is there and the mechanics are good, but there is no version of using it that the platform has agreed to. Third-party scrapers for exactly this endpoint are sold commercially, which is itself the clearest sign that no official route exists.

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Launch platforms we did not test

These have a real launch moment with upvotes, and are worth a look — but we have not checked whether their data can be read back out, so we are not going to imply that we did.

StartupBase · DevHunt · Microlaunch · Smol Launch · Launching.co

Often recommended, but not launch platforms

These appear on nearly every alternatives list. None of them has a launch day, so none of them produces the thing a launch is for: a placement, on a date, against a field. They can still be worth using — just not for this.

AlternativeTo

An alternatives directory. Likes accumulate over years; there is no launch day to place in.

SaaSHub

A comparison and review site, not a launch board.

BetaList

Collects early users and waitlist signups before launch. No upvote ranking to be measured against.

Indie Hackers

A community forum. Posts get attention, but there is no ranked launch.

AI directories

There's An AI For That, Futurepedia, Toolify and similar are catalogues. Listings, not launches.