Where to Launch Your Startup in 2026: 5 Platforms and What Each One Is Actually For

Where to launch your startup is usually asked as if there is one right answer with a ranked list underneath it. There is not. Four of the five platforms below are places to launch. One is a catalog that also hands you a free way to check whether any of it landed. Scoring them against each other would be scoring a venue against a measuring tape.

I run Nick Launches, a product discovery directory for indie founders. I have submitted to a few hundred directories by hand and wasted a fair number of evenings on submissions that were never crawled.

Disclosure: Nick Launches is one of the five, so I have an interest in founders listing their products. PeerPush was added later, as a sixth entry, under an agreed two-way listing exchange: they list Nick Launches in their Best Product Hunt Alternatives post, and I list them here. The numbers below are dated and sourced so you can check them.

The Five Platforms at a Glance

Four of the original rows are somewhere to launch. One is somewhere to look things up. PeerPush, ScrollLaunch and StartupBase are the sixth, seventh and eighth rows, added on 2026-09-03, 2026-09-08 and 2026-09-10 after this post was written around five, which is why the title and the headings still say five. Domain ratings are from VerifiedDR on 2026-08-09, with LaunchIt checked on 2026-08-11, LaunchIgniter on 2026-08-16, PeerPush on 2026-09-03, ScrollLaunch on 2026-09-08 and StartupBase on 2026-09-10, and referring domains from DataForSEO on 2026-08-10. The section near the end covers why those two columns do not say the same thing. The rest of this post is what each row means in practice.

Nick Launches: The Venue

Nick Launches runs on a weekly cycle. Products launch into a week, get ranked by upvotes, and stay listed permanently after the week closes. Week 32 of 2026 carried 89 launches.

Submission is free and the listing does not expire. You get a page, a do-follow link, and placement in a category. There are 40+ categories: 493 products in AI, 452 in Productivity, 204 in Developer Tools, 204 in Marketing, as of 2026-08-05.

The leaderboard ranks builders by launches and upvotes rather than ranking only products, so shipping regularly compounds. There is an embeddable badge, and an API plus an MCP server, which means you can query the directory from Claude Code or any MCP client instead of clicking through it.

The free thing worth having even if you never submit is the directory catalog at nicklaunches.com/tools/launch-directories/. It tracks 169 directories with DR, traffic level, backlink quality, pricing model, niche and link type on every row, and flags which ones require a badge on your site in exchange for the link. Sort by DR or traffic, filter by price and niche, and mark each one Visit, Done or Skip. It is the checklist I wish someone had handed me in week one.

Aura++: A Launch With Distribution Attached

Aura++↗ (opens in a new tab) is also a place to launch, but what it sells is what happens after the listing goes up.

A free launch gets you a project page, community upvotes, homepage placement and a Pinterest post. The paid tiers at $17 and $34 add a launch blog post and syndication to X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Pinterest and Facebook. Everything runs on daily slots rather than a weekly cycle: 5 slots a day on the free tier, a 365-day booking window, and three re-launches on a 30-day cooldown.

The catalog behind it is substantial. 5,763 users, with 825 projects in AI, 370 in SaaS, 368 in Productivity, 292 in Marketing Tools and 195 in Web Development.

The detail worth copying is how they handle the do-follow link. On the free tier you get one only if you finish in the daily top 3 and display their badge. Most directories leave that condition undocumented and you discover it by checking the rel attribute weeks later. Aura++ puts it on the pricing page before you submit.

LaunchIgniter: The Highest Authority and the Strictest Free Tier

LaunchIgniter↗ (opens in a new tab) has the highest domain rating in this post and the tightest conditions attached to its free tier. Both facts matter, and most write-ups only mention the first.

It runs a weekly cycle, like mine. Every launch starts at 00:00 Monday UTC and holds a homepage slot for seven days, the top three by upvotes take a Winner badge, and each product gets one launch with no relaunch. Week 32 of 2026 carried 43 launches here, against 89 on my own site in the same week. The platform lists 9,100+ makers.

Read the free tier twice, because two conditions are stacked on it. A free launch needs their badge on your site, it waits in a queue, and only the weekly top three get a backlink at all. So you trade a link, you wait, and you can still finish fourth and get nothing. Basic at $12 one-time removes both conditions: no badge verification, no queue, and a lifetime do-follow. Pro at $15 adds lifetime do-follow links from StartupTrusted, DR 51, and SaaSGrow, DR 54.

Check who owns those two before you count them. StartupTrusted, SaaSGrow and AppPage are all listed as LaunchIgniter's own projects in its footer. Three links from one operator's network is one relationship rather than three independent referring domains, and search engines weigh it closer to the first. That is not a reason to skip it. Basic at $12 is the cheapest guaranteed do-follow in this post, and it comes from the highest-DR domain in it. It is a reason to read the $3 upgrade as two extras on one relationship rather than as three separate links.

The measured numbers under that DR hold up better than most directories in the seventies: TrueDR 67, trust score 67, and 27,151 monthly visits with traffic validated, per VerifiedDR on 2026-08-16. The audience is real, which is the thing a domain rating on its own will not tell you.

AI Directories: The Catalog and the Free Instrumentation

AI Directories↗ (opens in a new tab) covers 100+ directories specific to AI products, and says it has promoted 800+ startups for 1000+ founders. It also sells a done-for-you submission service, which is outside what I am covering here.

The reason it is on this list is the free layer. It publishes 15+ tools with no sign-up and no credit card: name generators, hashtag and bio generators, email and blog writers, SEO helpers. Most are ordinary. One is not.

The AI Mentions Tracker checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini name your product, with a separate tracker per engine. Almost nothing else in launch tooling gives that away free.

It matters because launch traffic and AI citations come apart. A product can have a good launch day and still be invisible when a buyer asks an assistant for the best tool in its category. When I audited my own site, a third-party trust-check page I do not own and did not write was cited more often than my own homepage. The full method is in how to audit your site's AI visibility. For the five-minute version, their tracker is a reasonable start.

LaunchIt: The Cheap Slot on a Young Domain

LaunchIt↗ (opens in a new tab) is the smallest and newest of the five. Check the domain before you submit: launchit.fast is not launchit.site, which is a separate directory with a similar name and a different domain rating.

It runs a calendar rather than a queue. You pick a launch date, the page stays up permanently afterwards, and the pitch is the indexed page rather than the launch day itself. 100+ products have launched, 500+ founders are listed, and it publishes its own traffic on the homepage: 87,994 listing views and 328 website clicks. Top categories are Marketing and Sales at 26, SaaS and Business Tools at 25, Creative and Media Tools and Productivity at 23 each, and Developer Tools at 18.

The free tier has a condition worth reading twice. You get a permanent page with community votes and reviews, but approval requires a link back to them from your site first. Premium at $19, down from $39, removes that condition and adds a guaranteed do-follow backlink, a verified badge, a dedicated X post and any date you want instead of the review queue. Above that, Boost at $49 puts you across the site for 30 days, Get Featured at $39 a month buys homepage placement and category ranking, and a relaunch costs $15.

The honest part is the authority. DR 30 against 71, 72, 74 and 71, though it has gained four points in the last month. A link from here is worth less today than a link from the other four, and at $19 it is the second cheapest paid option in this post, behind LaunchIgniter's $12. Whether that trade is good depends entirely on which of those two facts matters more to you.

PeerPush: The Listing Written for Machines

PeerPush↗ (opens in a new tab) is a product discovery platform aimed at two audiences at once. People browse it like any other directory, and AI assistants read it as data: every product is described in structured, machine-readable fields that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and the rest can parse rather than guess at. It reports 44,000+ builders and around 789,000 monthly visitors.

Three things set it apart from the venues above. The structured data is the point rather than a side effect, so the listing is built to be quotable by an assistant. There is an MCP server and a public API, so the catalog is queryable from a client instead of a browser. And there is a build-in-public community attached, with the usual upvotes, which means the listing is not the whole of it.

The model is ongoing submission rather than a launch day. A free listing joins a publishing queue and waits. Paid tiers publish instantly and add promotion on top: $39 Basic, $89 Boosted, $229 Max-Boosted. So the trade here is time against money, the same one LaunchIt and LaunchIgniter ask you to make, without a ranked window at the end of it. What you are buying is sustained visibility, including the kind you cannot see in analytics. Their own account of what AI crawlers pull off those pages is in what AI assistants look for in a product page.

ScrollLaunch: The Weekly Board Written for Machines to Read

ScrollLaunch↗ (opens in a new tab) runs the same weekly shape I do. Launches land in an ISO week, get ranked by upvotes, and the product page stays up after the week closes, with past weeks archived at their own URLs rather than deleted. Week 37 of 2026 carried 27 launches. Behind that sit 701 live products from 612 makers across 44 categories, per its own stats page on 2026-09-08.

What separates it from a plain weekly board is who the pages are written for. Every product page ships an AI-readable markdown version alongside the HTML, there is a public REST API that needs no key to read, an MCP server, and a CLI you can run with npx. The bet is that a launch page should be legible to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity as well as to Google, which is the same bet PeerPush is making from a different direction. It is run by one person, Kalash Vasaniya, which is worth knowing before you weigh the roadmap.

The free tier condition is the one to read carefully, and to its credit the pricing page states it rather than burying it. A free launch gets a do-follow product-page link only while the ScrollLaunch badge stays on your site. Take the badge down and the link goes with it. Premium at $19 one-time makes the link always do-follow and adds a gold verified badge, priority feed placement, the advanced SEO fields and a slot in the Monday newsletter. Premium+ at $39 one-time adds a generated article of roughly 1,800 words on their blog carrying 4+ do-follow links back to you. Both are one-time per product rather than subscriptions, which puts $19 level with LaunchIt and just above LaunchIgniter's $12.

Do the same arithmetic on Premium+ that I did on LaunchIgniter's Pro tier. Four links from an article you paid to have published on one domain is one relationship, not four referring domains, and search engines weigh it closer to the first. It may still be worth $39. Just do not count it as four.

The free thing worth taking even if you never launch is the directory leaderboard: 1,017+ startup directories ranked by DR, with 833 flagged free to submit and 594 flagged do-follow. It covers the same ground as my own catalog of 169, from a different angle and at a different depth, and having two lists disagree about a directory is usually a faster way to find the dead ones than trusting either.

StartupBase: The Oldest Board Here, and a Paid One Beside It

StartupBase↗ (opens in a new tab) has been publishing launches since 2017, which makes it the oldest venue in this post by several years. It is run by one person, Atta, independently and self-funded, and it has put out 3,800+ products in that time. It reports 60,000+ monthly visitors, 18,900+ founders and makers, and 15,100+ newsletter subscribers. VerifiedDR puts the domain at DR 73 on 2026-09-10, which matches the number the site advertises.

The cycle is daily rather than weekly. New launches go live at 00:00 PDT, and the page stays public and indexed afterwards, wired into topics, collections, maker profiles and the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly archives. That is the same shape as a weekly board with the window shortened, so the spike is smaller and there are more of them.

The free tier asks for two things, and the pricing page states both rather than hiding them. Your listing waits in a queue that currently runs about four to five weeks out, and the StartupBase badge has to sit on your site. Premium starts at $39 one-time and drops both: any date inside the next 30 days, or tomorrow, a guaranteed homepage feature on the day, a permanent do-follow link, no badge and no review queue. Newsletter, extended homepage time and a review are add-ons above that.

The part to read twice is Outrank, which is a separate door into the same domain. It is a pay-what-you-want board starting at $15 once, it takes any website or social profile with no product page, no account and no review, and it carries a permanent do-follow link from that DR 73 domain. Rank is the total you have ever paid, so the order reshuffles whenever somebody tops up, and the top three run in the sitewide sidebar and in every newsletter. As a placement it is unusually honest about being an auction. As a link, price it with your eyes open: a do-follow link bought on its own for money is what Google's link spam policy calls a link scheme, and the exposure sits with the buyer. A $39 launch is paid too, in the same way every paid tier in this post is, but the link there comes attached to a product page and a launch day. The $15 one is the link by itself.

Do the ScrollLaunch arithmetic on the ad menu as well. A 1,000+ word editorial review on their blog with do-follow links back to you is $99, marked down from $199. Premium placement across the listings is $99 a month and a newsletter sponsorship is $59 an issue. The review is a fair price for a permanent page that can rank for "your product review" searches, which is a query you will otherwise cede to somebody else. Just count it as one relationship with one domain, the same way you should count LaunchIgniter's Pro tier and ScrollLaunch's Premium+.

Where to Launch Your Startup: A Realistic First Week

Do these in order. The order is the point.

Day one, launch on a venue. Pick somewhere with a defined window and a leaderboard to climb, whether that window is a day or a week, submit your product, and tell the people who already follow you. One venue done properly beats five done at once.

Days two to four, work the list. Open a directory catalog, sort by whether the link is do-follow, and submit. This is where a submission tool pays for itself, because the work is identical forty times over and your attention will not survive it otherwise. I sell one of those, so read this next link as an ad rather than as advice: hand-done directory submissions.

Day five, take a baseline. Run the mention check across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and write down the answer, including the zero if it is zero. In week one it nearly always is. That is fine, and you cannot see movement without a starting number.

Then wait. Directory links get crawled on the directory's schedule, not yours. Re-check in a month.

What None of These Do

A listing is not distribution. None of these puts your product in front of a buyer who was looking for it. They put you where crawlers and browsers pass by. Founders who expect customers from a directory submission are usually disappointed. The ones who expect crawl paths and a slow trickle of referrals are usually not.

None of them tells you why nobody converted, either. That is a different kind of venue: somewhere you launch a vibe-coded app↗ (opens in a new tab) and get written notes back from reviewers who are paid to be specific, which is worth more in week one than another do-follow link.

Many directory links are nofollow or badge-gated, and the listing page rarely tells you which. Check the rel attribute yourself before you count a link as won. A badge-gated link means trading a link on your site for a link on theirs, which is a fair deal as long as you know you are making it. Aura++ makes that trade a condition of the do-follow link, LaunchIt makes it a condition of free approval, and LaunchIgniter makes it a condition of a free launch that may still produce no link. All three say so up front, which is more than most do.

DR is not traffic, and it is not evidence. Four of these five domain ratings sit inside a three-point band, and the fifth is forty points below them. Neither of those facts tells you much on its own. The backlink profiles underneath the top four are not three points apart, and LaunchIt being at 30 says it is young rather than that it is worthless.

The number to work out yourself is links per referring domain, which is total backlinks divided by the number of sites those links come from. Aura++ has the highest referring domain count here, and it averages more than 500 links from each of them. AI Directories averages 136. A ratio in the hundreds is what sitewide badge links look like from the outside: one site agrees to display a badge, and the link repeats on every page that site has. It is the same trade described two paragraphs up, seen from the other end. LaunchIt and LaunchIgniter are out of this comparison because I could not get a referring domain count for either, and a number I cannot source is not one I will print.

I am not exempt from this. My own ratio is 300, closer to Aura++ than to AI Directories, and my referring domain count is the smallest of those three. None of it means anyone is doing anything wrong. It means two domain ratings one point apart can be built out of quite different things, which is a habit worth having about every directory you are about to submit to, including mine.

FAQ

Where should I launch my startup first?

Somewhere with a defined launch window and an audience of builders, so you get a ranked day rather than a page nobody visits. Then treat the next thirty directories as background work rather than as launches. Launching everywhere on the same day splits whatever attention you have.

Do directory backlinks still work in 2026?

The link half works when the link is do-follow, and a good share are not. The half that consistently pays for a new domain is discovery. Google has to fetch your URL before it can judge it, and on a young site it frequently has not. A listing on a page that already gets crawled is one of the cheaper ways to put your URL in front of a crawler.

Should I submit to directories myself or use a tool?

Under about twenty, do it by hand and learn what the forms ask for. Past that, the work is repetitive enough that a tool wins. Either way, check the rel attribute on your live listings afterwards, because that is the part no tool verifies for you.

How do I know whether my launch worked?

Pick your measure before launch day. Referral traffic in analytics, listings that are live and do-follow, and whether an AI engine names you when asked for tools in your category. Upvote counts feel like the measure and are the least useful of the four.

Pick the Job, Then Pick the Platform

If you need a room with people in it, you need a venue. If you have forty forms in front of you, you need a tool. If you have no idea whether any of it landed, you need a measurement, and that one is free.

Most founders buy the second thing before doing the first, and never do the third at all.

Open a directory list, check which links are do-follow, and take your baseline before you submit anything. The baseline takes ten minutes, and it is the only thing that will make next month's numbers mean anything.