The alternatives to Product Hunt worth your time are the launch boards that list a product for free, with no badge, no vote trade and no queue booked months ahead, and few of them do. We tried one real product, Oneprofile, on the boards in the planner above and wrote down what each asked and what happened. Most never listed us.
How to read each board
Pick a board, or read the whole list. Each one gives its cadence, its free route, its paid options and what happened when we submitted, with the day we last checked. Our results fall into four kinds: the board lists us, we are waiting for a free slot, we made an account but have not launched, or we stopped.
Prices and queues are as each board showed them on those dates, and boards change both often.
What the free route really costs
Line the free routes up and a few conditions cover nearly all of them: a badge on your homepage, upvotes or comments on other launches first, a turn in a long queue, a verified identity, or a fee with no free route at all. Only a few asked for nothing but a form.
We stopped at the boards that wanted a badge or a vote trade. Google's spam policies list excessive link exchanges as link spam, and Product Hunt and Hacker News both forbid asking for upvotes. Most free launches we saw get a nofollow link, so a paid tier mostly sells a date you pick and a followed link.
One thing the lists never mention: a product can already have pages on these boards that someone else made. Moving ours to our own account took support emails and contact forms, and some had not answered when we last checked.
Where to start
Plan your Product Hunt day first. It is free, and how to launch on Product Hunt has the rules and the checklist.
Submit to the boards that listed us straight away, and fill the page in properly. It outlives launch week.
Join the free queues on the day you decide to launch, so the slot comes to you.
Search each board for your product's name before you make a new page.
Pay only when the date matters to you.
Launch boards mostly send other makers. For the buyers who browse none of them, Oneprofile counts the people who fit your product for free and helps you write to them by email and LinkedIn.