Every day, after launching, makers are contacted on LinkedIn and X by people offering to sell votes. As the Product Hunt team, we are very much aware of this and really hate it. We have systems in place to neutralize this type of gaming. Every vote counts for a different number of points on Product Hunt. A couple examples:
An account with a recently created gmail address and no history of quality contributions on Product Hunt: this vote will count for 0 points. Yes, this might be a well intentioned user, but we take a conservative approach to protect the community. If the account has a company email or applies for verification on Product Hunt, that's a different story.
An account with a company email address linked to a legitimate LinkedIn account with a history of meaningful contributions on Product Hunt: this vote carries significant weight.
A couple questions for the community:
Are there specific accounts on Product Hunt that you suspect participate in vote selling? You can reply here or email report@producthunt.co
What would you want to see us do differently here?
Hello Product Hunt! We are thinking of spinning up topic specific, weekly digest newsletters that break up the firehose of goodness that is the Product Hunt leaderboard. What topics would you subscribe to? Who would you like to see sponsor these newsletters?
Here is an early prototype of what an AI Agent Digest newsletter might look like: https://gist.github.com/kerzhner...
I keep hearing and reading about how programmers are at risk; basically, everything that can be replaced by AI is at risk.
Yesterday, Lenny Rachitsky shared a post that PM openings are at the highest levels since 2022.
At the same time, I read how big giants (Meta, Amazon, etc.) are laying off engineers because of AI, and then I read about how they had to hire back again because something managed by AI went wrong.
According to @RevenueCat 's State of Subscription Apps 2026 report, "hard paywalls convert 5x better than freemium, but with significantly wider variance."
Day 35 download-to-paid, freemium vs. hard paywall
Does access method impact download-to-paid conversion within 35 days?
I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market. That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.
In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.
For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools:
We just wrapped the Orbit Awards for AI Dictation and now we re moving to the next category: AI Automation.
This one is for the tools that actually do work for you clearing chores, running workflows in the background, or quietly taking over a chunk of your week without turning into another dashboard you have to babysit.
