Everything makers ask before they launch

Yes. Submitting a product, getting a launch day, your product page, the badges and a maker profile all cost nothing, and there is no card involved at any point. What is for sale is optional and all of it is on the pricing page: three paid launch tiers, which choose your day and, higher up the ladder, how visible you are on it; a sponsored spot in the sidebar; and a Awesome Indie Pro membership that lifts the caps on your account. None of it is needed to launch.

Software built by an independent maker, a solo founder or a small team: web apps, mobile apps, developer tools, extensions, APIs, indie SaaS, and side projects that are genuinely usable. It needs a public URL that loads and describes the product. Agency portfolios, listings for somebody else's product and resold white-label products are turned down.

Yes. Submit things you built or helped build. A launch page here is attached to your maker profile, and the whole point of the discussion under it is that the person who made the thing is around to answer. Submitting somebody else's product is one of the reasons a review will refuse it.

One thing: a link to the product. Our AI reads that page and drafts the name, the tagline, the description and the categories, along with the address the product gets on awesomeindie.com — all of which you can rewrite completely before anybody sees them. A logo and a few screenshots are worth adding while you are there.

If the link works and the page honestly describes what the product does, yes, and plenty of launches here are early. The most common automatic refusal is a website that does not load or is still a template, so a placeholder page is the one thing worth waiting on. Keep it as a draft in the meantime; drafts are private and have no page anyone can reach.

Yes, from your products, at every stage: while it waits for review, after it is accepted, and after it has launched. The one exception is its address on the site, which is frozen the moment you submit, because it is what every link, badge and archive entry already points at.

The automatic check usually reaches a submission within the hour. If it hands your product to a human, which is the normal outcome for anything not clear-cut, it waits for that human, which can be a day or two. You can keep editing while you wait.

Both, in that order. An AI check reads every submission and the page it links to, and it is only allowed to decide by itself on a short list of things a machine can be sure about: a website that does not load, a broken link in the website field, placeholder or gibberish copy, and impersonating somebody else's brand. Every other conclusion, however confident it sounded, becomes a question for a human.

The reason is written on the product itself, in your products. The usual ones: the website did not answer when we fetched it, the page was still a template, the product is not software, the same site launched here less than six months ago, or the copy was written for a search engine rather than a reader.

Yes. Pull the product back to a draft, change what the reason names, and send it in again. There is no penalty for it and no limit worth worrying about. If you think a decision is simply wrong, email [email protected] and a human will look at it themselves.

No. Edits to a launched product go live immediately and are checked afterwards, and a check on something already public is never allowed to take it down on its own. The most it can do is raise the matter with a human. Your product does not leave the site because you fixed a typo.

On the next launch day with room on it. Every day is a launch day, and between 20 and 30 products go out on each of them at the moment, while more than that are submitted, so the queue is around four months deep as things stand and how far out your date is depends on how deep it is when you are accepted. While your product is still in review it is shown an estimated window, and the moment it is accepted that becomes a fixed date. We email you 7 days before, unless the date is closer than that already.

Not once you have it. Dates are handed out once and frozen, and nothing we change afterwards is retroactive. If we change how many products launch a day, and that number has moved several times over the years, everything already holding a date keeps it. The earliest any product can launch is tomorrow; today is never available, because today's line-up was published at midnight.

Yes. Every paid launch tier from Skip the Line up picks its own day, and Skip the Line at $14.99 once per product is the cheapest way to one. Any day from tomorrow up to 365 days out is fair game, and you can change it as often as you like until it goes live. The cheapest paid launch, Fast-track at $4.99, does not let you choose: it sets your day 14 days after you book, and that day cannot be moved. Paid launches have no daily cap and sit on top of that day's free ones, so buying one never pushes another maker off their day.

Midnight UTC. The whole day's line-up is published at once and stays on the homepage for the day, so nobody gets a better slot by launching at a particular hour.

By upvotes, and by nothing else. There is no editorial ordering and no place in the ranking for sale. A Boost Launch or Premium Launch buys a place above the day's list, wearing a flame so a reader can see it was paid for, and the numbered ranking underneath it is the same ranking it would have been: the day is still won by whoever earned the most upvotes, and the placement ends when the time paid for does, after the launch day for a Boost Launch and after 5 days for a Premium Launch. Every upvote counts as one, whoever cast it: a long streak or Awesome Indie Pro changes how many you can cast in a day, never what each one is worth. A product cannot even be upvoted until it is live, so nobody arrives at midnight with votes banked in advance.

Yes. Tell your newsletter, your followers and your group chat, that is what launch day is for. Upvoting needs an account and each account counts once per product. What does get removed is the manufactured version of that: accounts created to vote for one product, and second accounts used to review your own launch.

The launch happens without you and the page stays up afterwards, so nothing is lost. It does make a difference though: answering the comments on the day is most of what turns a launch into upvotes, which is why the reminder arrives 7 days ahead.

The link to your website is nofollow until your product passes 20 upvotes, and a followed link after that. It is worked out from the live count every time the page is rendered, so it is not a one-time award: a product that drops back under the line goes back to nofollow. A directory that hands every submission a followed link is a link farm and gets treated as one, which would make the link worthless for the products that earned it.

Indefinitely, at the same address, with its description, screenshots, upvotes, rating and discussion. Your launch day is archived as it stood, and the product goes on being ranked in its week, its month and its year, as well as in the categories it belongs to, which is where most of the traffic after launch week comes from.

Yes. A “launching soon” badge before the day and a “featured” one after it, both available from your products. Each comes as HTML, JSX or Markdown for a README, in light, dark, or a version that follows each visitor's own theme. Putting one up on your own domain also earns your product the Domain verified badge, below.

That the product's own domain links to Awesome Indie, which shows the people who control that domain are the ones who listed it. Put any of our badges, or any link to awesomeindie.com, on the site your listing points to, and the black badge appears next to the product's name everywhere on Awesome Indie. It needs a domain of your own: a product on GitHub, Notion, an app store, a social network or a free subdomain such as one on Vercel cannot earn it, because that domain belongs to the platform. We check every week, and you can check straight away from the badges window in your products. If the link disappears, the badge goes after two checks in a row that cannot find it. It is only a badge: it changes nothing about the ranking, the launch date or how your own link is followed. Our check reads the page your server sends without running its JavaScript, so on a site built entirely in the browser the badge has to be in that HTML to be seen.

The link to your own website can be changed whenever you like, along with the rest of the listing. The product's address on awesomeindie.com cannot, once you have submitted it: badges, archives, social posts and other people's links all point at it, and a moved page would break every one of them.

Yes, from the product's own edit page. It is permanent and it takes the upvotes, comments, views and uploaded images with it, so there is a confirmation step in the way. A draft nobody has seen deletes just as cleanly.

Yes. Launches go out on our social accounts, and the 5 products that rose to the top of the week are the Monday newsletter. Neither is something you have to ask for. The one thing on that list you do have to buy is a Premium Launch, which adds a social post of its own and a place in the next newsletter after its launch day.

A sooner launch day and a product slot. For $4.99 once per product, your launch is booked the moment you pay, for the day 14 days later, instead of the next free day at the end of the queue. You do not pick that day and it cannot be moved. Your product is accepted when the launch is booked, and the slot it adds to your account stays yours after the launch. If you would rather choose the day, move up to Skip the Line for $10. It is the cheapest of four launch tiers.

A launch day of your choosing and a product slot. For $14.99 once per product you choose your launch day instead of taking the next one in the queue, and you can change that day as often as you like until it arrives. It also adds one to how many products your account may have submitted at a time, and that slot stays yours after the launch. Your product is accepted when you book the day. Everything else, the ranking and the page, is identical to a free launch. It is the second of four launch tiers: Fast-track below it sets the day for you, and the two above it add visibility rather than anything else.

Both include everything Skip the Line does. Boost Launch, at $29.99, puts your product above the list on the homepage, in the site sidebar and on your category pages for the whole of your launch day, with a flame on the card so readers can see it was paid for. Premium Launch, at $59.99, keeps that placement for 5 days from your launch day, and adds a place in the next weekly newsletter after your launch and a social post of your own on X, Bluesky and Mastodon linking to your site. Both are shelf space and nothing else: neither moves a number in the ranking, and the placement ends when the days you paid for do.

Yes, any time before your launch day begins, and you pay the difference rather than the full price twice. From Fast-track it is $10 to Skip the Line, $25 to Boost Launch or $55 to Premium Launch, and any of them lets you pick your own day. From Skip the Line it is $15 to Boost Launch or $45 to Premium Launch, and from Boost Launch it is $30 to Premium Launch. You never have to buy the rungs in between. Once the day has started the tier is fixed, because what it pays for is already running.

Paying never improves your ranking, and that is the rule the site is least willing to bend. A launch day is ordered by upvotes no matter who paid for what, and the most any tier buys is a labelled place above that list for one day or five, which leaves the numbers underneath exactly where they were. It does skip the wait for review: a paid launch is accepted the moment you book it and is never rejected automatically. The rules still apply to it, though. An admin can remove a paid product that breaks them, and if we do, you get your money back.

Polar is our merchant of record: they take the card, issue the invoice and handle the tax, and we never see your card details. Your invoices are in your billing settings.

Before your product launches, yes: email [email protected] and the date is released, whichever tier it is. Once the launch has happened, the thing you bought has been delivered. Awesome Indie Pro and a sponsorship can be cancelled any time and stop at the end of the period you have already paid for.

Your logo, a line of copy and a link in the sidebar on every page of the site, for $149.99 a month. Every one is reviewed by a human first, and we do not run gambling, casino, crypto, adult or get-rich-quick advertising. Ask at [email protected].

With Google, GitHub or X, or with your email address and a password. You can connect more than one of those to the same account from your settings and use whichever is to hand, and an account made with a social login can add a password there too.

Both, from your settings. A new email address has to be confirmed from a link we send to it before it takes effect, so the change is not instant.

Signed in, you can upvote any product that is live, comment as much as you like, and leave one rating of one to five stars per product, and the average is shown on the product page. Replies do not carry ratings, and your first rating on a product is the one that counts.

Turning up and taking part on consecutive days builds a streak, and the longest ones are on the leaderboard. Filling in your profile, upvoting and shipping your own products also earn achievements, which sit on your profile.

The 5 products that rose to the top of the week, every Monday, and nothing else — plus, in the weeks there are any, a short honourable mentions section underneath for the week's paid launches that did not place, kept out of the ranking rather than mixed into it. The form is at the bottom of every page and one click unsubscribes.

Every product page has a report button, with the usual reasons on it: a broken link, spam, a misleading listing, inappropriate content, somebody else's work, or a duplicate. Reports go straight to the moderators. Anything urgent or awkward: [email protected].

From your account settings, yourself, without asking us. Be aware of what goes with it: deleting the account deletes the products you submitted, along with their upvotes, comments and views. There is no way to hand a launch over to somebody else first, so if a product should stay online, keep the account.