Product Hunt is not the only place to launch — and often not the right one.
Every list of "Product Hunt alternatives" repeats the same names with the same adjectives, and not one of them says how big those places are, what a visible placement costs, or which of them your launch could actually win. Those are the only questions that matter, and they have measured answers.
The number nobody tells you
Launch platforms differ by more than an order of magnitude in how many products they take a day. On the biggest one, hundreds of products compete and a visible placement costs three figures of upvotes. On the smaller ones, the whole day's field is smaller than the front page of the big one — and a founder who can move a couple of dozen people lands at the top of it.
That is the same launch, the same product, the same audience — and two completely different outcomes. The only thing that changed was the room. Almost nobody picks the room deliberately, because almost nobody has counted what each one demands.
What we do about it
We read every launch day on five launch platforms after it has closed, and keep what it held: the size of the field, what the day's winner scored, and what each placement down the ranking actually cost. Every day, one more day on file. It is the day as it happened — not a survey, not an estimate.
535 board days are on file so far, and every board adds one more every day.
Your day, not a typical one
A median per platform would be the wrong answer anyway. What decides your launch is your day against the reach you actually have, and that is a different number from the typical one — often by a factor, not a few percent. Run the free analysis on a launch that already happened, and you can see what a placement cost on the other boards that day. Planning the next one instead? That is what the Launch Kit settles first.
The per-platform tables themselves stay behind the products, and the reason is plain: working out which boards can be measured at all, and then counting them every day, is most of the work behind both.
What the table settles
The question almost nobody asks before launching: whether the room you picked is one you can actually place in. A founder who can move thirty people will never reach Product Hunt's featuring line — and on most days is at the top of a smaller board with the same thirty. That is a decision worth more than another week of polishing, and it is the one thing you can still change.
These numbers say what a placement costs, in upvotes, on days we counted ourselves. What it is worth in visitors is something no platform publishes — so anyone quoting you that is guessing, and we are not going to join them.
Which one is right for your launch?
That is the first thing the Launch Kit settles, before the date, the tagline or anything else — because how far your reach goes decides which room you belong in, and everything after that depends on the answer. Written against your product, from the days we measured, within 48 hours.
Already launched on Product Hunt? The free analysis puts your result against the whole day it ran in — several hundred launches, not the ten on the front page. No account and nothing to pay: the comparison against the other boards asks for an email address, once.