Two kinds of slow
Most launch directory lists tell you where to submit and say nothing about when. The when decides whether a listing appears during your launch or a month after it, and a submission can be slow for two different reasons that need opposite responses.
A queue is slow because a person reviews it. A moderator works through submissions in order and yours waits its turn. You beat a queue by joining it earlier.
A gate is slow because you don't qualify yet. What it wants is something only the calendar or other people can produce: an account old enough to post, karma, an invitation from an existing member, a partner's approval, or customers who can write reviews. Effort in launch week does nothing for a gate. Either you started weeks ago or you don't get in this time.
Founders tend to find the gates in launch week, so sort your list by queue or gate first and by date second.
Unless a site's own page is cited, every lead time below is LaunchBeam's planning estimate. Real waits drift, so use them to order your list, not as deadlines.
8+ weeks out: earn standing you can't buy
The longest lead time on a launch list isn't a queue. It's your account history.
New accounts start behind on Reddit, Hacker News and Indie Hackers. Some subreddits gate posts on karma or account age, and the rules change. Hacker News shows new accounts in green and holds flagging, vouching and downvoting behind a karma threshold. Indie Hackers doesn't publish a rule we could find. LaunchBeam's catalog assumes the launch subreddits need about 60 days of normal participation, and Hacker News and Indie Hackers about 30. Those are LaunchBeam's estimates, not published rules. The Reddit post covers how to read a subreddit's rules before you post.
Participating means something dull on purpose: be useful in threads that have nothing to do with you, with no links and no product mentions. A day you skip now can't be made up in launch week.
- Standing is two tasks, not one. You start participating at the front of your runway, and you post the product near launch, when the account is oldest. A plan that gives "Reddit" a single date gets one of those days wrong.
- Invite-only means invite-only. Lobsters grows by invitation, and new members can't send invites for their first 70 days. Its about page counts both commercial promotion and content without meaningful human authorship as spam, and asks that self-promotion stay under a quarter of your stories and comments. If you know a member, ask them. If something you wrote has already been posted there, the about page asks you to reach out in its chat. Otherwise treat Lobsters as a bonus, never as part of the plan.
4–6 weeks out: get into the moderated queues
LaunchBeam's catalog treats AlternativeTo and Crunchbase as human-reviewed queues of about 21 days, and gives BetaList and the AI tool directories about 30. Fazier's free tier says it reviews and lists within 30 days. Say you submit to a 30-day queue ten days before launch. On that estimate you go live about three weeks after the spike. You still get the backlink and some long-tail traffic, but not on the day the traffic arrives.
Paid lanes are faster, and at several sites the paid lane is now the only one. There's An AI For That puts average processing at one to two days, Futurepedia says a Verified listing goes live within two business days, and BetaList shows each plan's timeline when you choose it. BetaList and Futurepedia no longer take free submissions, and Uneed has closed its free line to new products.
So treat 30 days as the free-queue case, and beat it by getting in early.
2–3 weeks out: freeze the page, then do the quick ones
A directory reviews whatever is live on the day a moderator opens your submission. If you're still rewriting the hero, they see the draft, and the tagline you pasted into their form no longer matches your site.
So finish the landing page before this window starts:
- The headline, subhead and main call to action are final.
- Screenshots match the current product, in the sizes the directories ask for.
- A one-line description, a 160-character version and a long version exist as text you can paste.
- If you want a Show HN later, people can use the product without an invite or a wait.
Then work through the quick-review sites. LaunchBeam's catalog puts SaaSHub, StackShare, Launching Next and Startup Base at about two weeks, and treats most of that as your own asset prep rather than their queue. What a reviewer can reject here is yours to control: an image in the wrong size, a vague tagline, a broken link.
Launch week: fire everything instant at once
Product Hunt and Show HN publish when you press the button, and a paid Uneed or Fazier launch goes out on a date you pick or are assigned, so the date is the whole decision. LaunchBeam's view is that these should all go out within the same few days, because a launch spike comes from concentration. Spread over a month, the same submissions become a month of small blips.
Which channels a tool can post for you depends on each platform's API, and the auto-post guide goes through them one by one.
Product Hunt is free. Its help center recommends posting your own product and says you don't need a hunter. Its launch guide warns that paying anyone to hunt your product or send it traffic can get the product removed and your account banned. Timing and the rule for founders with more than one product are in the Product Hunt post.
Show HN needs something people can try
The Show HN guidelines name what's off-topic: "blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material." They also ask you not to post landing pages, and not to do a Show HN at all until the work is ready for users to try.
If all you have in launch week is a waitlist page, you don't have a Show HN yet. Two routes stay within the rules: make a regular submission of a technical write-up of how you built the product, or hold the Show HN until someone who isn't you can use the product without asking for access. Either way, don't ask friends to upvote or comment. The same page says that's not OK on HN.
After launch: the review sites need customers first
G2, Capterra, GetApp, Software Advice and Trustpilot are all built around customer reviews. In LaunchBeam's view a listing with no reviews looks worse than no listing at all, so it treats these sites as post-launch work at every pace.
LaunchBeam's rule of thumb is to wait until you have about ten happy customers, then ask them all in the same week. That's a heuristic, not a platform requirement.
G2's plans page says a free profile can't respond to reviews, and of the badges it earns it can use only "Users Love Us"; report-based, milestone and annual badges need a paid plan. Starter, the cheapest paid plan, costs more in its second year than its first; the table below has both prices. G2 announced in January 2026 that it was buying Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner; paid placement on those three is pay-per-click, covered below.
Once the listings exist, the attribution post covers which of them actually sent you customers.
What it actually costs
"Free or paid" hides most of what matters. Launch destinations charge in five different ways, and adding them into one total misrepresents four of them.
| Model | What you pay | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Nothing, at any tier | Product Hunt, Show HN, a subreddit post |
| Free, with paid skip-the-line | Nothing, or a fee to go faster or pick your date | Fazier |
| Paid only | A fee before anyone reviews you | BetaList, Futurepedia |
| Revenue share | A cut of the sales the listing makes | AppSumo |
| Pay per click | A price per click, billed against a budget | Paid placement on Capterra, GetApp, Software Advice |
A sixth label matters as much as the five: not checked. An unknown price isn't zero.
The prices, as of today
Prices and policies checked on September 10, 2026.
| Destination | Model | Price and terms |
|---|---|---|
| Product Hunt | Free | Free to launch; posting your own product is recommended |
| Show HN | Free | Free to submit; it must be something people can try |
| Fazier | Free, with paid tiers | Free Basic tier listed within 30 days, backlink to Fazier required; paid tiers $29, $49 and $99 one-time, currently shown as discounts from $39, $69 and $139 |
| Uneed | Paid launch date | The free line is closed to new products; $14.99 for a slot in about two weeks, $29.99 to choose your date |
| BetaList | Paid, refunded if not selected | All submissions are paid; plan prices appear on the submission form |
| There's An AI For That | Paid, refunded if not published | A $49 review fee, or $437 for the package with a newsletter feature; one tool a month is picked for a free listing |
| Futurepedia | Paid only | $497 one-time for a Verified listing, refunded if the editors deny it |
| AppSumo | Revenue share | You earn 95% on buyers you bring (the 5% is a processing fee) and 70% on AppSumo's returning customers; paid 60 days after month end; your price there must be the lowest online |
| G2 | Free profile, paid features | The free profile can't reply to reviews and can use only the "Users Love Us" badge; Starter is $299/month or $2,999/year in year one, then $599/month or $6,000/year |
| Capterra, GetApp, Software Advice | Pay per click (paid placement) | One PPC service covering all three sites, billed against a budget you set; the service description doesn't state the minimums |
Two caveats. AppSumo's payments policy says the rate on existing customers is negotiated with its business development team, so treat 70% as the published default. On Capterra, LaunchBeam's catalog recorded a $2 minimum bid and a $500 monthly minimum when it was last checked on August 2, 2026. Capterra's current service description publishes neither figure, so ask the sales rep before you budget. Budget a monthly minimum as a subscription, not a launch cost.
A skip-the-line fee mostly buys speed
BetaList's plans differ mainly in how fast you're featured, and a startup that isn't selected gets its money back automatically. There's An AI For That and Futurepedia also refund you if they don't publish you. At those three, paying doesn't get you past the editors. Uneed is the exception: both of its paid options promise guaranteed publication, and what the fee mainly buys is the date. Fazier's paid tiers buy scheduling, promotion and no backlink requirement, on top of a free path that takes up to 30 days.
Where a free path still exists, a skip-the-line fee is the cost of going faster, not the cost of launching. Start early enough and you rarely need it, which is part of the case for an eight-week runway. The fee earns its keep only when one specific listing must be live on one specific day and you're already inside its queue time.
A zero-budget launch is still possible. Product Hunt, Show HN (once there's something to try), the subreddits where you've earned standing, Indie Hackers and Fazier's free tier cost you time and no money. So does a free G2 profile, once you have customers to review it. What has shrunk is the number of free moderated queues.
Pick a pace honestly: 2, 5 or 9 weeks
A shorter runway can shorten your time in a queue, because you submit later and accept going live later. It can never shorten a gate. The three paces below are LaunchBeam's plan templates, each with what it gives up.
Two weeks. You give up:
- The launch subreddits, Hacker News and Indie Hackers, unless you already have an established account there. Two weeks can't produce 30 or 60 days of history.
- Lobsters, plus AppSumo-style partner deals, which close on someone else's calendar.
- Every free moderated queue as part of the spike. Submit anyway for the backlink, but expect them to go live after launch day. Paid lanes are the exception.
- A second draft of the landing page, and testimonials before launch.
Five weeks. The assets get a real revision, and the roughly 30-day communities (Hacker News, Indie Hackers) come within reach if you start participating today. You give up:
- The 60-day subreddits. Five weeks of participation still leaves you about 25 days short, though the standing you build carries into your next launch.
- Lobsters and partner deals, still.
- Free moderated queues on launch day. On LaunchBeam's estimates, a 30-day queue submitted 18 days out goes live about 12 days after launch: sooner than at two weeks, still after the spike.
Nine weeks. Every 21-to-30-day directory queue has time to clear before launch, and you have time to build standing where it's needed. You give up:
- Nine weeks in which a finished product sits unlaunched, earning nothing.
- Lobsters, still. A longer runway doesn't produce an invitation.
- The 60-day communities, unless you start participating on day one.
At every pace, the review sites come after launch, because no runway produces ten happy customers.
An account you already have, with real history, changes the math more than any pace: it turns a gated channel into an ordinary launch-week post. Read that community's current self-promotion rules on the morning you post.
Where LaunchBeam fits
LaunchBeam's directory engine holds 89 built-in destinations: 71 sites and communities plus 18 launch subreddits. Each carries a lead time, a gating type and a cost model, and every priced row shows the date its price was checked. Several prices here differ from the catalog's seed prices, checked on August 2, 2026, so read that date before you budget. The budget view counts skip-the-line fees as optional rather than committed spend, reports pay-per-click minimums separately, and labels a destination with an unknown cost model "Cost not checked" instead of counting it as free.
The launch plan runs at the three paces above, and a pace compresses only queue lengths. A gated row the pace can't reach comes back as a skip or a substitute with an alternative, not a date you can't hit. On a subreddit, Indie Hackers or Hacker News row, ticking "I already have an account here" turns it back into a normal submission, and Lobsters has its own member box. That box doesn't bring Show HN back at the idea and pre-launch stages, where the plan skips it because there's nothing to try yet. The Hacker News connector also blocks a Show HN with no destination URL or one pointing at a LaunchBeam waitlist page.
The Product Hunt, Hacker News, BetaList, AppSumo, G2 and Capterra rows are locked on the Free Trial and open from Starter up. The pricing page has the details.
