Awesome Indie is a launch board for indie products
Somewhere between 15 and 30 products launch here a day as things stand, submitted by the independent makers, solo founders and small teams who built them, and ranked by upvotes from other makers. Launching is free.
- Products submitted
- 11,895
- Makers signed up
- 9,448
- Countries represented
- 80
- Categories
- 148
Counted straight from the database. Every submission is included here, launched or not. The full set, with the record days and my flat months, is on Open Analytics.
The story so far
Six years of it, one rewrite that kept almost nothing of what came before, and one rule I held on to for far longer than I should have.
2020
The first version
The oldest maker account and the oldest product on Awesome Indie are both dated 30 November 2020, which is where the site's public metrics begin. What I built was a single page with a hand checked list on it, one product featured a day, and a form that emailed me every time somebody submitted something.
I built it to answer a small, specific frustration of my own. The big launch sites were still the best place to put a new product in front of people, but their front pages had stopped looking like the people reading them. A launch backed by a funded marketing team sat in the same list as my weekend project, and the weekend project lost every time.
30 Nov 2020Oldest record on the site
2021
Word gets around
Submissions started arriving faster than one product a day could publish them. In April 2021 I submitted the site to BetaList. At that point Awesome Indie was a directory that only accepted products made by indie makers or independent teams, featuring exactly one product a day.
2022
The Product Hunt launch
On 15 May 2022 I launched Awesome Indie on Product Hunt and finished the day ranked first, with 280 upvotes. By then the one a day rule had already been relaxed: the site was publishing two products a day going into the launch, and three a day from 16 May onwards.
The following day is still the single best day for signups the site has ever had: 41 makers joined on 16 May 2022. It was also the day I stopped being able to tell myself the backlog was fine. Hundreds of people had submitted a product to a list that could publish one of them a day.
2023
Rebuilt from the database up
On 19 February 2023 I decided to move the code out of the three separate repositories it was split across, one per microservice, and into the single monorepo it still lives in today. Keeping three deploys in step with each other was most of the work of running the site, and none of that work was ever visible to anybody using it.
The rest of the changes that mattered were not visible either. Products gained a real lifecycle, so a submission, an accepted product and a published launch stopped being the same row with a flag on it. The launch calendar became something I could tell a maker about in advance. Later I moved the site off serverless hosting onto one server I can reason about, back up, and pay for with a single invoice.
2024 to 2025
One a day stops being enough
Makers were waiting seasons for a launch date, and most of them were being turned away by attrition rather than by any decision I had actually made. So I published more of them, and then more again: three a day, then five, then ten. What that fixed was not the look of the list, it was the honesty of the queue.
Opening the queue up also brought the people who were not here to launch anything. Expired domains bought for the traffic they still had, crypto and casino sites wearing a product name, and makers using the website field on their own profile to point a followed link at something that had nothing to do with them. Almost every rule on the rest of this page comes from that period: a link that has to be earned, a review nothing skips, and the fact that money can buy a date here and nothing else.
The ranking grew in the same stretch. A single front page became daily, weekly, monthly and yearly boards, each with a dated archive for every period that has ever run, so a launch keeps a permanent address instead of scrolling off the bottom of the homepage. A maker leaderboard, a map of where everybody is, and category pages that carry on sending traffic long after launch day all came out of the same idea: launch day should be the beginning of a listing, not the whole of it.
15–30Products a day as it stands now
2026
Version three
The site you are reading is a rewrite of nearly all of it: a new front end, a new authentication layer, a new database client, and the first working version of the reviewer described further down this page. I spent most of it fixing bugs that had been quietly wrong for years, then went through the whole database and removed what should never have been in it: the bot accounts, and the spam products they were built to post.
AI is the honest reason I can keep a project this size going next to everything else. It writes code with me, which is where the free time to work on things like this now comes from, and it does the first read on every submission, comment and profile that arrives. Moderation used to be the ceiling on how many products I could publish a day, because it was all me and my evenings. It is not the ceiling any more.
March 2026 was the best month for signups in the history of the site, at 413. I published Open Analytics, so the numbers I read about my own site are the numbers you can read too, including the flat months. Two paid options appeared, both deliberately narrow: choosing your own launch date, and a sponsored slot in the sidebar. Neither of them buys a position in a ranking.
413Signups in March 2026
How a launch works
Four steps, and the only one that takes real effort is the one you were going to do anyway.
Submit
The form asks for a title, a link, and very little else. The site then reads your page itself and drafts a tagline, a description and a set of categories for you to correct. Filling in a long form before anybody has said yes is the step at which most people give up, so I made sure it is not the first step.
Review
Every submission is checked before it can be scheduled. Most are decided within the hour. Anything the check is unsure about is held for me to read rather than guessed at.
A date you can plan around
Accepted products take the next free slot in the queue and keep it. Dates are handed out once and never moved, so a date you are given is a date you can build an email around. There are between 15 and 30 free slots a day as things stand, and the earliest one is tomorrow, because today's line up published at midnight.
Launch day
Your product joins that day line up and is ranked by upvotes from the community. Nothing else feeds into that order. When the day ends the product keeps its page, its badges, its categories and its place in the weekly, monthly and yearly boards.
What does not change
A directory is only worth reading if the list is not for sale. These are the promises I build everything else on the site around.
The numbers are public
Signups, submissions, upvotes, comments, countries and the record days are all on the Open Analytics page, recalculated straight from the database. The quiet months are on there too.
Indie means indie
Products built by independent makers, solo founders and small teams. I turn down funded company launches, agency listings and resold white label products. That filter is the entire reason I built the site.
Money never buys a ranking
Position on a launch day is upvotes and nothing else. The paid options sell a date and a sidebar slot. Neither one moves a product up a list, and neither one skips review.
Links are earned
A product outbound link is nofollow until the product passes 20 upvotes, and it goes back to nofollow if the count falls under again. A directory that hands a followed link to every submission is a link farm, and search engines are right to treat it as one.
No advertising I would not read
No gambling, casino, crypto, adult or get rich quick sponsorships, whatever they are willing to pay. I approve every sponsor myself before it goes live.
Launching stays free
The free path is the main path, not a trial of the paid one. It gets a launch day, a product page, a maker profile, the rankings and the category pages.
Who builds it
An indie maker myself, which is the whole reason this exists.
My name is Diogo Capela, an independent developer in Portugal, and I maintain Awesome Indie. I write the code, read the escalated submissions, approve the sponsors and answer the email. There is no company behind it and no investor.
It pays for itself. One server, two optional paid options, and a newsletter. I keep the budget deliberately small enough that I never have to sell you something you did not come here for.
Questions, corrections, or a product you think should not be listed, write to me at [email protected] or send a message on X (Twitter).
Common questions
The ones that land in my inbox most often, answered here so they do not have to.
- What is Awesome Indie?
- Awesome Indie is a directory and daily launch board for indie products. Somewhere between 15 and 30 products launch a day at the moment, submitted by the independent makers, solo founders and small teams who built them, and ranked by upvotes from the community. It has been running since 2020 and is free to launch on.
- Does it cost anything to launch?
- No. Submitting a product, getting a launch day, your product page, your maker profile and your place in the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rankings are all free. Two optional paid extras exist: choosing your own launch date, and sponsoring the sidebar for a month. Neither is needed to launch.
- How long does it take to get a launch date?
- Review is usually decided within a day, and an accepted product takes the next free slot in the queue. With between 15 and 30 slots a day as things stand, the wait is normally days rather than months. The earliest possible date is tomorrow, because each day line up publishes at midnight.
- What counts as an indie product?
- Something built by an independent maker, a solo founder or a small team, usually bootstrapped. Funded company launches, agency listings and resold white label products are turned down. If a real person built it and can answer questions about it, it belongs here.
- Can paying improve my ranking?
- No. The order of products on a launch day is decided by upvotes from the community and by nothing else. Paying chooses the date, never the position. Paying also does not skip review, and a paid launch that has to be refused is refunded.
- Do I get a backlink?
- A product outbound link becomes dofollow once the product passes 20 upvotes, and reverts to nofollow if it drops back under. Below the threshold the link is nofollow. Paying does not move that line — a paid launch buys the date, and what each paid option covers is set out on the pricing page.
- How are submissions reviewed?
- Every submission is checked before it can be scheduled, by a mix of AI automation and human review. Refusals can be appealed by email.
Launch something
The next free slot is one form away, and there are between 15 and 30 of them on each launch day at the moment.