How we check

Every day we send a request to every product's own website and record what came back. That's the whole trick. Nothing here is a vote, a rating, or an opinion.

Where the products come from

We watch 12 launch platforms — Product Hunt, Peerlist, PeerPush, TinyLaunch, MicroLaunch, Uneed, BetaList, Devhunt, OpenHunts, Tiny Startups, Smol and Fazier — and pull every product they list, once a day. Not the top ones. Every one.

What “live” actually means

We ask the product's site for its homepage. If it answers, we mark it live. If the domain has no DNS record at all, or nothing is listening on it, we mark it not responding. Anything else — a timeout, a bot wall, a server error — and we say nothing.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Free hosting goes to sleep and answers with an error while it wakes up. We used to call that death, and it wrongly buried healthy products. So the rule now is one-sided on purpose: we only claim something is gone when we're certain. Right now 1,370 products sit in that “we don't know” bucket, and we won't pretend otherwise.

How the filters are built

Every product carries labels — free, no sign-up, works offline, for musicians— and each label points back at the exact sentence in the product's own description that justified it. If the text doesn't say it, we don't claim it. There are 20,813 such labels right now.

We deliberately don't use the categories founders pick on launch platforms. We measured why: an audio mastering tool was filed under “Developer Tools”, a weight-loss pill under “Design”. Those categories describe how someone wanted to be found, not what the thing is.

Why there are no rankings

We checked what happened to everything that launched on Product Hunt on one day two years ago. Of the products we could resolve, about a quarter are gonetoday — and the ones with the most votes did not survive better than the ones with almost none. The second-place product that day, with 760 votes, doesn't even have a DNS record anymore, while plenty of 9-vote products are still up.

So ranking by votes would tell you what was loud in one day, not what will be there next month.

What we can't tell you yet

We've only been watching for about 8days. That's long enough to say what's alive right now, and notlong enough to tell you how long things usually last. We're not going to dress that up.

We also can't see whether a product is still being worked on— only whether its site answers. A site can stay up long after everyone walked away. We're building toward that, by watching whether the page itself changes over time.

Corrections

If we've marked something wrong, it's a bug and we want to know. The check runs again every day, so a fix shows up within 24 hours.