Terms of Use

These terms are a binding agreement between you and Awesome Indie — an independent project run from Portugal by its founder, Diogo Capela — covering the website at awesomeindie.com, the API behind it and everything you do on either. Browsing is enough to accept them; signing in or submitting a product certainly is.

If you do not agree with them, do not use the site. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are confirming you are allowed to bind it. Read the Privacy Policy alongside this — it is part of the same deal and explains what happens to your data.

Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have by law that cannot be signed away, including the statutory rights of consumers in the EU.

A curated directory of products made by indie makers, small teams and solo founders. People submit products, we review them, and the ones that make it through are listed and ranked over a day, a week, a month and a year. There are profiles, upvotes, comments, follows, streaks, leaderboards and a newsletter around that.

A listing is not an endorsement. We do not test the products in the directory, verify what they claim, or vet the people behind them beyond spam screening. Rankings are produced by our own ordering of engagement and editorial judgement, we can change how they work whenever we like, and the daily cut-off runs on Lisbon time. Whatever you do with a listed product — buy it, install it, hire its maker — is between you and them.

You need to be 16 or older, and not barred from using services like this where you live. If we have banned your account before, you do not get to come back under a new one.

Accounts are created by signing in with Google, X or GitHub. There is no password to lose, but the security of those provider accounts is what protects yours: anything done from a signed-in session is treated as done by you. Tell us at [email protected] if you think someone else is in it and we will end the sessions on our side; disconnecting the provider in Settings → Account is the quickest thing you can do yourself.

Keep the information on your profile accurate, and keep it to one account per person. Usernames are first come, first served; we may reclaim or change one that impersonates someone, squats a brand, is offensive, or is being used to game search. If you are here on behalf of a company rather than as a person, mark the account as a business account.

When you submit something, you are confirming all of this:

• You made it, or you have the right from whoever did to list it here
• The link works, points at the actual product, and is not a redirect chain or an affiliate wrapper
• The title, tagline and description describe the product honestly
• Anyone you credit as a maker really is one
• Nothing in it infringes anyone's copyright, trademark or other rights

Submitting also means we may fetch things from the product's own website to build the listing: its favicon, an image for the card, and a screenshot of the page, taken by our own server and stored on our CDN. If you would rather we did not, say so at [email protected] and we will use what you supply instead.

You can edit or delete your own submissions from My Products. Deleting your account deletes them too.

Everything submitted is checked automatically first: a model reads the submission and the page it links to. That check can decide some things by itself. A product waiting for review may be accepted, which books its launch day, or refused — but it may only refuse on a short list of clear-cut grounds: a website that does not load, a broken link in the website field, placeholder or gibberish copy, and impersonating somebody else's brand. Anything less clear-cut is handed to a person, which is the normal outcome, and a product already on the site is never taken down automatically. Clause 05 of the Privacy Policy sets out the whole of it, including your right to have a person decide instead.

We may reject a submission, list it on a different day than you hoped, correct its categories or tidy its wording for clarity, merge or drop a duplicate, or unlist something later — for example when its domain expires, its link breaks, or the site behind it turns into something else. None of that requires a reason, though we will usually give one if you ask.

You keep every right you had in what you submit — products, profile, comments, images. We claim no ownership of any of it.

To be able to run a directory, we need your permission to use it. So by posting anything here you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable licence to host, store, cache, reproduce, resize, crop, adapt for layout, publish, publicly display and distribute that content on and in connection with Awesome Indie, for as long as it is posted here.

That licence exists so we can serve your listing, generate cards and previews from it, index and rank it, and promote it as described in the next clause. It ends when you remove the content — allowing for the time it takes caches, feeds and search engines to catch up, and for the copies in our backups to cycle out. It does not let us sell your work, and it does not let us claim we made it.

You are responsible for what you post. Do not post anything you would not want published, and do not post anything you do not have the right to publish.

Getting eyes on indie products is the point of the site, so a listing travels. When a product is featured we announce it automatically on our own accounts on X, Bluesky and Mastodon — typically the name, tagline, link, image and any maker handle credited on the submission. Listings also go out in our newsletter, our RSS feed and our sitemap, and are indexed by search engines.

If you would rather your product were not posted to social, or want a post taken down, email [email protected] and we will remove ours. What other people have already shared or what a search engine has already crawled is not ours to take back.

Do not:

• Game the rankings. No second accounts, no coordinated or bought upvotes, no botted views, no asking a service to inflate any number on this site
• Spam. No content farms, SEO doorway pages, dropshipping clones, resubmitting a rejected product, or submitting other people's products at volume to farm backlinks
• Deceive. No impersonating another person, maker or company, no fake maker credits, no bait links
• Ship anything harmful. No malware, phishing, scams, illegal content, or sexual content involving minors
• Harass anyone. No abuse, threats, hate speech or targeting individuals in comments, profiles or the support chat
• Scrape or hammer us. No bulk automated collection of pages, profiles or the API, no attempt to get round rate limits or authentication, no security testing without asking first. Use the RSS feed and the sitemap; ask us at [email protected] if you need more
• Interfere. No probing, overloading or disrupting the site, and no reselling access to it or to placements on it

The API exists to serve this website. It is not a public API, it carries no stability promise, and using it for anything else needs our written agreement.

Anyone can report a listing — a broken link, spam, something misleading, something that infringes — from the product page itself, with no account needed. We read every report. We are not obliged to monitor everything, and a report is not a promise of a particular outcome.

When these terms are broken we may do any of the following, with or without notice, in proportion to what happened: reject or unlist a product, edit or remove content, hide an account from the map and the leaderboards, mark it as spam, suspend it, or ban it and delete it.

Two of those can happen automatically, within seconds and before anyone has read the thing: a comment can be hidden by the automatic check, and a submission can be refused by it. Both are reversible, neither deletes anything, and neither can touch your account or anything already published — clause 06 above and clause 05 of the Privacy Policy say where the line is drawn. Everything else on that list is a person's decision.

If you think we got it wrong, email [email protected] with what you disagree with. A person reviews appeals and will explain the outcome.

The site itself — its name, logo, design, copy and code — belongs to Awesome Indie and is protected by copyright and trademark law. These terms give you no licence to it beyond using the site as intended. Do not copy the directory, clone the design, or use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you.

Every product name, logo, screenshot and description in the directory belongs to its own owner and appears here to identify and describe that product. Nothing in the directory implies a relationship between us and them.

Reporting an infringement

If something here infringes your rights, email [email protected] with the URL, what exactly is infringing, proof of the right you hold, your contact details, and a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised. We act on valid notices promptly, usually by unlisting first and asking questions after, and we will tell whoever posted it. Deliberately false notices are not welcome and we may ignore repeat senders of them.

Attributions

Our robot logo is by Font Awesome. Diploma icons by Freepik, party icons by Smashicons, both via Flaticon.

Getting listed is free. Two things on the site cost money, and neither of them buys a ranking or a decision. A Skip the Line pass is a one-off payment, per product, that lets you choose your own launch day out of the days still open instead of taking the next one in the queue — you pick the date after paying, so nothing is held against a checkout you abandon, and you can move it as often as you like until it launches. A sponsored slot is a monthly placement in the sidebar. Current prices are on the pricing page.

Payments run through Polar, which acts as merchant of record: Polar takes the payment, issues the invoice, handles the tax, and its terms govern the transaction itself. Manage cards and invoices in Settings → Billing.

Refunds

While your product has not launched yet, ask us at [email protected] and we will refund the pass and release the date. Once it has launched, the thing you paid for has been delivered and there is no refund. If we turn a paid product down at review, you get your money back.

A sponsorship runs to the end of the month you have paid for and you can cancel any time before that. We can decline a sponsorship, and we can end one that turns out to break these terms — in that case there is no refund. If we end one for any other reason, or fail to run it, you get a pro-rata refund of the unrun part.

Sponsored placements are always labelled as such, are reviewed by a person before they go live, and we do not run gambling, casino, crypto, adult or get-rich-quick advertising. Consumer withdrawal rights apply where the law gives them to you; note that a launch or a placement which starts immediately at your request may be treated as performed.

With an account, we email you about your own submissions — when one is accepted, carrying the launch day it has been given; a reminder shortly before that day; and on the day it goes live — and about the account itself, such as confirming a change of email address. Those are part of the service. A refusal is not emailed: the reason is written on the product in My Products. The newsletter and the general updates are optional, and both are switched on or off in Settings → Notifications. If you subscribed to the newsletter without an account, email [email protected] and we will remove your address.

Nearly every link here goes somewhere we do not control. We do not vet those destinations, we are not responsible for their content, their security, their privacy practices or what they sell you, and a link is not a recommendation. The same goes for services we depend on — hosting, payments, analytics, email, the support chat — each of which has its own terms.

Awesome Indie runs on a single server, maintained by one person. We work to keep it up and we publish an uptime page, but there is no service level here: expect occasional downtime, and expect maintenance without notice.

We may add, change, restrict or remove any feature at any time, including features you rely on, and we may stop operating the site altogether. If we shut it down for good we will give reasonable notice so you can take your content with you.

The site is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranty of any kind, express or implied, about it: not that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure, not that the rankings are accurate or fair, and not that anything in the directory is safe, legal, functional or as described. Your use of it, and any dealing with a listed product, is at your own risk. Statutory guarantees that consumers have by law are not affected by this clause.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost traffic, lost data, lost goodwill or lost opportunity, arising out of your use of the site — including from downtime, from a ranking or moderation decision, from content someone else posted, or from anything a listed product did to you.

Where we are liable, our total liability for all claims is capped at whatever you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or €100 if you paid us nothing.

Nothing here excludes liability we cannot exclude by law: death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, our own intent or gross negligence, or any liability to a consumer that the law protects.

If someone brings a claim against us because of something you posted — a copyright or trademark claim, a claim that a product you listed misled or harmed them, a claim about a maker you credited without asking — you will cover the loss, including reasonable legal costs, to the extent it results from your content or your breach of these terms. We will tell you about any such claim and not settle it without talking to you first.

You can stop at any time. Deleting your account in Settings → Account is immediate and irreversible: it removes your account, your sessions, your connected sign-in providers, your submitted products, your comments, your upvotes, your follows and your activity history. Take copies of anything you want to keep first.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or that we are required to act on by law. Clauses that are meant to outlast the account do — the licence in clause 07 for content still posted, clause 11, and clauses 16 to 18, 21 and 22.

We may update these terms. The "last updated" date at the top always tells you the current version, and material changes will be announced on the site before they take effect. Carrying on using the site after that is how you accept them; if you would rather not, delete your account. Earlier versions are in the site's public git history.

These terms are governed by the laws of Portugal, and the courts of Lisbon, Portugal have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

If you are a consumer resident in the EU, that does not deprive you of the protection of your own country's mandatory consumer law, nor of your right to bring proceedings in the courts where you live. Before going anywhere near a court, please email [email protected] — nearly everything is quicker to sort out that way.

If any clause here turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands and that clause is read as narrowly as it needs to be to work. Not enforcing something straight away is not giving it up. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours if the project changes hands, on notice to you.

These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the site, and they replace the previous versions of both. Nothing in them makes either of us the other's partner, employee or agent.

Anything about these terms, a takedown, an appeal or a sponsorship: [email protected]. Account or technical trouble: [email protected].

There is also a chat bubble in the corner of every page. It reaches the same one person, so treat it as a message left rather than a line that is always staffed: there is no response time promised here, and a takedown, an appeal or anything else with a deadline attached to it is safer by email. Clause 03 of the Privacy Policy says what happens to what you type into it.