Where to Launch Your Startup in 2026: 21 Platforms Checked One by One

Checked on 17 September 2026. We read every platform's own pricing, FAQ, help and rules pages that day, looked at the link attributes on real listings, and pulled live Ahrefs Domain Rating figures. Where a platform does not publish something, this page says "not published".

Most lists of places to launch a startup are copied from older lists, and it shows. They still describe free tiers that have closed, platforms that have been renamed, and queues measured in days that are now measured in months. We run LaunchIt and a directory submission service, so we fill in these forms every week, and we still found surprises when we went back through all of them in one sitting.

This page is the map: 21 platforms, what each one costs in money, time and effort, and an order to launch in. LaunchIt is ours and is on the list. We have tried to describe it as bluntly as the others.

What changed in 2026

• BetaList is no longer free. Its support page says all submissions are paid and that the free option is gone. Prices are shown only at the end of the submission form.
• Uneed closed its free line, then reopened it with a launch-day bar. Closed on 17 August because the queue had passed six months, back on 11 September: dates are assigned 30 days to 5 months out, and a free launch needs an upvote score of 10 to stay published.
• Open Launch's free slots are booked into 2027. In practice it is a $12 platform now.
• Tiny Startups moved to pay-to-rank. The home page is a board where a higher payment ranks higher, from $69. The free weekly board remains, but the submit flow says a free listing gets no backlink and is not indexed by search engines.
• BetaPage is gone. The domain redirects to PitchWall, which is positioned around AI products and has a minimum 30-day wait on its free tier.
• DevHunt is weekly and not always free. A week with 15 or more tools costs $49 to join, and every upcoming week on the calendar was past that when we checked.
• Firsto's free queue is about 180 days, by its own pricing page.

The short answer

• A developer tool: Show HN, DevHunt and Peerlist Launchpad, then Product Hunt.
• A micro-SaaS or side project: LaunchIt and one weekly platform now, the MicroLaunch and Uneed queues in the background, Product Hunt last.
• A product with a waitlist and no working app yet: BetaList is built for that stage, and it is paid. Show HN rules out products people cannot try, and Product Hunt does not feature waitlisted ones.
• A consumer or broad-appeal product with an audience: Product Hunt is worth the effort, after two or three rehearsals elsewhere.
• B2B SaaS whose buyers compare options: launches help less than review and alternatives sites. Start with SaaSHub and its alternatives.

Free is never free: the three currencies

Every platform below has a free option or used to. What you pay with instead is one of three things, and knowing which one tells you most of what you need.

1. Time in a queue. From nothing (Product Hunt, Show HN, Peerlist) to about four weeks (TinyLaunch, StartupBase) to several months (Uneed, MicroLaunch, Launching Next, Firsto).
2. A badge or link on your site. Fazier, LaunchIgniter, Nick Launches, Tiny Startups and LaunchIt require one for a free launch. StartupBase halves your wait if you add theirs, and Scroll Launch keeps your link followed only while theirs is up. That is a link exchange. A few are harmless, a footer full of them is not a good look, so choose the ones you would be happy to show.
3. Votes on the day. Uneed unpublishes a free launch that scores under 10. TinyLaunch, LaunchIgniter, Open Launch and Firsto keep their followed link for the top 3. If you have no audience yet, platforms that pay out on rank will pay you little.

All 21, side by side

The table is sorted by Domain Rating because that is the number people ask about, not because it is the one that matters most. DR describes the whole site, not your listing page. Audience fit and how long you stay visible will decide what a launch is worth to you. Our Domain Rating guide covers what the number can and cannot tell you.

The big stages

Product Hunt

Free, daily, no queue: you schedule a date up to a month ahead and go live at 12:01 AM Pacific for 24 hours. What people miss is that launching and being featured are different things. Product Hunt's help pages say not every product can be featured on the home page, that a team reviews each one, and that directories, templates, boilerplates, courses, services and waitlisted products are not featured. The same product, company or root domain has to wait six months and ship a significant update to launch again. You need a personal account, because company accounts cannot post, and you may not ask people for upvotes. More in Product Hunt vs LaunchIt and our list of Product Hunt alternatives.

Show HN

The only platform here with no queue, no fee, no paid tier and no badge. The rules do the filtering instead: it must be something people can try, ideally without a signup wall, not a landing page, waitlist, newsletter or blog post, and not a quickly generated one-off. You have to be there to answer questions, and asking friends to upvote or comment gets posts penalised. Most posts get a few points. The ones that land are the best launch day a technical product can have.

Daily leaderboards for indie products

Uneed

The strongest indie daily board, with the most moving parts. Free dates are assigned 30 days to 5 months out. A free launch needs an upvote score of 10 to stay published and 20 to keep a followed link, and one that falls short cannot rejoin the free line. Fast-track is $14.99 for a slot in about two weeks, and Skip the line is $29.99 for a date you choose. Full breakdown in Uneed alternatives.

Fazier

Daily launches at midnight Pacific with monthly leaderboards. June 2026 had 375 launches. Free means a link to Fazier on your site, review and listing within 30 days, and a home page feature only if selected. Paid starts at $29 to publish immediately. Six months between relaunches.

StartupBase

Running since 2017 and quietly one of the clearer offers: free in 4 to 5 weeks with their badge (10 or more without), $39 to pick a date within 30 days. Their FAQ says that paying buys clearly labelled slots, not a place in the organic ranking, which is the right way to run it.

LaunchIt

Ours. It is the smallest platform on this page with the lowest Domain Rating, so do not expect the biggest launch day. It is built for what happens afterwards: every product keeps a permanent page with votes, reviews and screenshots under categories and tags, and the link to your site is followed on every listing, free or paid. Free launches wait in a review queue and need our badge. Premium is $14.99 once for a date you choose, the home page that day and the newsletter, with no badge. There is no launch-day score to hit. Prices for everything else are on the pricing page.

Open Launch, Firsto and PitchWall

Open Launch is open source, launches at 8:00 UTC, and is $12 for a next-day slot now that free slots are booked into 2027. Firsto runs 5 free and 10 premium launches a day, with about 180 days of free queue or $19.90 to launch within 24 hours. PitchWall, the former BetaPage, has a free tier with a minimum 30-day wait and one day on the home page, a $49 tier with a two-week wait, and $99 for a chosen date and the newsletter.

Weekly and monthly cohorts

A week or a month on a home page suits small products better than 24 hours. You are compared with a cohort, not with everything that launched since midnight.

Peerlist Launchpad

Opens every Monday and runs all week, with random ordering for the first two days. No fee, no queue, but only verified individual profiles can launch, and only the week's top 5 get a backlink. The audience is mostly engineers. See Peerlist Launchpad alternatives for the verification details and the ways around them.

TinyLaunch

Mondays, for tiny products. About four weeks of free queue, or $39 for the following Monday. A free launch gets a nofollow link unless it finishes top 3 and you add their badge. Head to head in LaunchIt vs TinyLaunch, plus a page of TinyLaunch alternatives.

DevHunt

Developer tools only, weekly, with logins through GitHub or Google to keep voting clean. Free when the week you choose has fewer than 15 tools, $49 when it has more.

LaunchIgniter, Scroll Launch and Nick Launches

Three small weekly platforms. LaunchIgniter gives every launch seven days from Monday 00:00 UTC, asks free launches for a badge without guaranteeing a date, and charges $12 for a guaranteed one. Scroll Launch has 20 free slots per week and a $19 Premium that includes its newsletter. Nick Launches reviews every listing by hand and asks free launches for a badge. Its next free week was about three and a half weeks out when we checked, and its premium price is not published. It also maintains a free catalogue of launch directories, which is handy for the long tail.

Tiny Startups

Once the default free launchpad for small products, now mainly a paid board: a minimum bid of $69 gets you listed at once, and higher payments rank higher. The free weekly board still runs (211 products the week we looked), with a badge required and, in the site's own words, no backlink and no indexing. The newsletter audience is the reason to consider it.

MicroLaunch

The only monthly format: a 30-day campaign inside that month's cohort, with a culture of blunt feedback. The free queue is two to three months or more by their own FAQ, and the Pro Launch is $49 with 40 spots a month. See MicroLaunch alternatives.

Curated lists

BetaList

For products that are unreleased or very recently launched. All submissions are paid, editors select what gets featured, and you are refunded in full if they pass on you. They reject template-looking landing pages and anything hosted on a free subdomain. Each startup can be featured twice, once before launch and once at launch. Its neighbours are covered in BetaList alternatives.

Launching Next

A long-running curated directory. Submitting is free and needs no account, but the site says it typically takes three months to review and publish, and publication is not guaranteed. An express review within one business day is offered, at a price the site states three different ways ($49, $99 and from $149), so check the checkout page before you count on any of them.

Rolling directories and communities

PeerPush

A discovery directory with daily, weekly and monthly rankings, now at peerpush.com. Free listings wait behind paid ones for an unpublished time, or you can launch at once with 400 points earned by engaging with other products. A paid Standard Launch is $39 and goes live immediately.

Indie Hackers

A community, not a launch: a products directory, a daily board of product updates and a forum. New accounts cannot post until they have taken part for a while, so join early. Promotion is filtered out, and stories with real numbers are rewarded.

One that turns up in most lists and does not belong: SideProjectors is a marketplace for buying, selling and showing side projects. It is useful if you want to sell a project or find a co-founder, not as a launch.

A word about links

Half of these platforms advertise a dofollow backlink, often as the headline benefit of the paid tier. Keep it in proportion. Judge a launch by the visitors, signups and feedback it brings, and treat the link as a side effect. Link policies change without notice (several changed this year), many are conditional on rank or a badge, and every platform here, ours included, can change its own tomorrow. If you want to check a listing yourself, our dofollow vs nofollow explainer shows how in a minute.

The order to launch in

1. Today: join the slow queues. Uneed, MicroLaunch and TinyLaunch all take a month or more for free. The wait costs nothing if you start it now.
2. Week 1: get one permanent listing live and fix what the first visitors trip over. Run the launch checklist before this, not after.
3. Weeks 2 to 4: one weekly platform per week. Peerlist if you can verify, DevHunt for developer tools, LaunchIgniter or Scroll Launch otherwise. Rewrite your headline and first screenshot after each one.
4. Weeks 4 to 6: the dated launches you queued for on day one, with the list of people you will tell already written.
5. When the pitch is proven: Product Hunt or Show HN. You get one good shot at each, so spend it last.
6. Alongside all of it: the long tail. General directories and review sites bring little each and a lot together. Our directory list is sorted by Domain Rating, and the submission service does it for you with a report of every live link.

Launches are one channel. For the others, read how to get traffic to your startup website in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Where should I launch my startup first?

Somewhere small that gives you a permanent page and honest feedback, not on your biggest stage. Use the first launches to find out what confuses people, fix it, and save Product Hunt or Show HN for when the pitch works.

Which launch platforms are really free in 2026?

Product Hunt, Show HN, Peerlist Launchpad and Indie Hackers are free with no queue, though each has rules about who and what can launch. Uneed, Fazier, TinyLaunch, StartupBase, MicroLaunch, LaunchIgniter, Scroll Launch, Nick Launches and LaunchIt have free tiers that cost you a wait, a badge or both. BetaList no longer has a free option, and Open Launch's free slots are booked into 2027.

How many platforms should I launch on?

Five to ten over the first six weeks is typical for a small product. Spread them out. Each launch asks something of your audience, and each one teaches you something you can use in the next.

How long do free launch queues take?

From nothing to six months. When we checked in September 2026: about 4 weeks on TinyLaunch, 4 to 5 weeks on StartupBase with a badge, up to 30 days on Fazier, 30 days to 5 months on Uneed, 2 to 3 months or more on MicroLaunch, about 3 months on Launching Next and about 180 days on Firsto.

Is it worth paying to skip the queue?

If the date matters, usually yes: most skip-the-queue fees are between $12 and $49, which is less than the value of a month. If the date does not matter, join the free queue today and launch elsewhere while you wait. Do not pay for position on a platform whose audience is not your buyer.