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The honest version of how LetsLaunch works, including the questions that don't make for great marketing copy. For the short version, see how it works.
Yes. A free launch costs nothing and isn't a trial — a spot on the weekly board, a public product page, upvotes and comments, a maker dashboard, and AI form prefill are free forever. Premium and Premium+ are optional upgrades on top of a launch you'd have anyway.
No. There's no human review queue and no editor deciding what gets listed. The only gate is automatic: we check that the LetsLaunch badge is installed on your own site before your listing is published.
New submissions are held while we look for the LetsLaunch badge linking back from your own site. Until we find it, your listing isn't on the homepage, the weekly board, or in search — it's only reachable by its direct link, and marked so search engines don't index it yet. Add the badge and the listing publishes automatically on the next check, with a fresh dofollow link and a full 24-hour window starting from that moment.
We run the first automatic check about an hour after you submit, then keep re-checking on a schedule. If you don't want to wait, add the badge and trigger a manual re-check yourself from your listing's badge page — you get up to 4 manual checks an hour.
It's a real, crawlable link back to your listing that you place on your own site. Requiring it keeps our outbound link profile honest — every dofollow link we hand out points to a listing the maker actually stands behind publicly, on their own site, not just on ours.
Grab the embed code from your listing's badge page and add it anywhere on your site. Any real link back to your product's LetsLaunch page counts, not just the styled badge image — as long as it isn't marked nofollow, ugc, or sponsored, and it points at your listing's exact URL.
Nothing happens to the listing itself — it stays published, stays on the board, keeps its votes and comments. What changes is the link: once the badge has been missing past a 72-hour grace period, your dofollow link switches to nofollow until the badge is back. We email you when that happens. Nothing is ever deleted for losing the badge.
On a schedule, not constantly: a missing badge is re-checked roughly every 6 hours, an errored check (usually a temporary outage on your end) every 2 hours, and even an already-verified badge gets a spot-check about once a day so a badge removed later is still caught. You can also trigger a manual check any time.
It means we couldn't reach or read your site on that check — a timeout, a non-200 response, or a page that wasn't HTML. That's treated differently from a genuinely missing badge: an error never costs you the dofollow link on its own, since a brief outage on your end shouldn't cost you what an actually missing badge would. We just try again on the next check.
Every listing gets 24 hours from the moment it goes live to reach 5 qualifying upvotes from real people. Clear the bar and the listing — and its dofollow link — stays up for good.
"Removed" really means soft-removed: nothing is deleted. The page stays reachable at its normal URL, but it's hidden from the homepage and browse pages, marked noindex so it drops out of search, and its outbound link switches to nofollow. You get one free relaunch, which clears your previous votes and gives the listing a fresh window on the current week's board.
Votes from accounts created less than 15 minutes before they vote still show on the page, but they don't count toward the 5-upvote threshold. That's meant to raise the cost of a burst of throwaway signups rescuing a listing real users haven't backed.
Yes, once per product, for free. Relaunching clears the votes it had, gives it a new launch time, restores its dofollow link, and puts it back on the current week's board with a fresh window to clear the bar.
No — buying votes, running vote rings, or creating accounts to vote for your own product defeats the point of the rule you're trying to earn. We may discount votes, remove a listing, or close an account when we see it.
Not as paid placement. A featured homepage slot, a sponsored blog post, and the homepage ad slots buy visibility only — never a dofollow link — and sponsored posts and ad creative carry rel="sponsored", per search engine guidelines. Premium and Premium+ are a different kind of purchase: they sell an always-dofollow backlink that no longer depends on the badge, on a listing you still had to earn a spot for the same way as everyone else. Paying never buys your way onto the board, and it never exempts you from the upvote rule — only from badge upkeep.
Visibility, for the period you pay for: an above-the-fold homepage ad slot for the week you book, or a write-up on the blog. None of it changes whether your listing survives its 24-hour window — that's decided entirely by real upvotes, whether you've paid for anything or not.
Sometimes. If we haven't delivered what you paid for yet — an ad week or featured slot that hasn't started, a sponsored post that hasn't been published, a newsletter issue that hasn't sent — we'll refund or cancel it. Once it's run or been published, it's not refundable, the same way it wouldn't be for any other one-time service. Duplicate charges are always refunded. Full details are on the refund policy page.
No — both are fulfilled by hand, not automatically the moment you pay. Newsletter Sponsoring starts a conversation to schedule an issue and review your creative; Directory Submission starts a submission pass to other startup directories that we track to completion and summarize once it's done.
Your account (name, email, and a profile image if you sign in with Google), the products you submit, and the votes you cast. If you buy placement, we store the amount, what it was for, and the Stripe identifiers — never your card details, which go straight to Stripe. See the privacy page for the full breakdown.
You can edit or delete your own listings any time from your dashboard. To delete your whole account, contact us from the email address on the account and we'll take care of it — see the privacy page for what's removed versus what's retained in anonymised form.