Launch venue rules, quoted from the source
Lists of places to launch a product disagree with each other and with the venues themselves. This page quotes what 5 venues say on their own pages, read on 2026-10-15, and says UNKNOWN where we could not read the answer. 1 of the 5 rows contain an UNKNOWN. Text in quotation marks is copied exactly from the page (a re-runnable script checks this); anything not in quotation marks is our reading. The Product Hunt row is marked UNCONFIRMED: its page answers scripted requests with 403, so we only have a summarising fetcher's reading of it. BetaList is not in the table because our fetch got only a login link. We quote rules; we do not rank venues or estimate traffic, because no source we found measured it.
| Venue | Cost (our reading) | Rule (quoted) | Limits (quoted) | Gate (our reading) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Show HN | No fee mentioned | "Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with." | "Don't post landing pages or fundraisers." | "Please don't ask friends to upvote or comment." | Must be usable by others; sign-up barriers discouraged |
| Product Hunt | Yes (UNCONFIRMED: summarising fetcher read "It's 100% free to use") | UNCONFIRMED (summarising fetcher; curl got 403): "The only real rule here is that you cannot ask people directly to upvote your product." | UNCONFIRMED (summarising fetcher; curl got 403): "Company accounts are prohibited." | Launch from a personal account (unconfirmed) |
| Lobsters | No fee mentioned | "self-promo should be less than a quarter of one's stories and comments." | "New users can't ... use tags for meta discussions or that are prone to off-topic stories (meta rant show announce satire job interview merkle-trees ask culture vibecoding )" | Invite required ("The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you recognize from the site."); treated as new for 70 days |
| awesome-selfhosted | A pull request, no fee mentioned | "Any software project you are adding was first released more than 4 months ago." | "Machine/LLM-generated contributions are not allowed and will result in a ban." | First release older than 4 months; free/open-source licence; tagged releases |
| DevHunt | UNKNOWN: launch cost not stated on the pages read | "The best new dev tools, voted by developers." | "your ad here · $149/week" | "your ad here · $89/week" | UNKNOWN |
How to use this
- Read the venue's own page before you post. Rules change and these quotes are dated 2026-10-15.
- Gates are calendar items: an age rule (awesome-selfhosted wants a first release more than 4 months old) or an invite (Lobsters) decides when, not whether.
- Never ask friends to upvote: Show HN says so on the page quoted above, and Product Hunt's page says so too as read through a summarising fetcher (unconfirmed).
- Venues that ban machine-written submissions must get a submission you write by hand.
Check the links yourself
The data and a 30-line checker that re-fetches every URL are open source (MIT): venues.json and check.mjs (the launch-venue-rules repository; link to follow once it is published). A 200 answer only proves the page exists. Product Hunt answers scripted requests with 403, so the checker shows it as blocked and its row is marked UNCONFIRMED.
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