Blog

The Public Development Roadmap for Open SaaS

Nov 21, 2025

We created Open SaaS to help developers launch full-featured SaaS products faster.

But launching fast only works when you’re working with clear direction and a good foundation. As an open-source project powered by Wasp, and with our users in mind, we thought it was important to add two things to this project:

A solid roadmap so that development is focused.
Making that roadmap public, to give the community a clear view of what’s coming next and how they can get involved.

So we created just that.

Behold, the Open SaaS public roadmap!

Why a roadmap?

Open SaaS is becoming a beast of its own. At 13k GitHub stars and growing, and with constant feature additions and improvements, we thought it was time to make future development more organized, transparent, and community-driven.

Open SaaS is used by thousands of developers

With tons of SaaS apps being deployed with Open SaaS, the needs of its users are also becoming more diverse. It would be impossible to address all of them, but we needed a way to track and prioritize the most important features and improvements.

Up until now, it was just me basically deciding which issues to work on and when. This was pretty inefficent to begin with, and then with more contributors joining the project, it became even more so.

The roadmap is thus a great way to make sense of all the different possible directions we can go in, help focus our efforts, and make development and contributions more meaningful.

How it works

Open SaaS currently has about 100 open GitHub issues, so it would be crazy to organize and track them all in the roadmap.

An example of an Epic in the Open SaaS roadmap

So to make things overseeable, the roadmap is a GitHub project with a collection of “Epics”. An Epic is just a GitHub issue with a bunch of sub-issues. Each Epic has a status and a progress bar to show you how many of its sub-issues are completed.

No regular issues are allowed in it, only epics, of which we don’t want too many. This way, its easy to understand the current themes and priorities of the project, as well as what’s currently underway.

Guiding themes

When creating epics within the roadmap, there are a few categories we’re focusing on at the moment. These guiding themes inform the epics we create, and help us make sure we’re addressing the most important needs of our users.

1. Real-world launch readiness

Open SaaS should not just be a polished demo, or a flimsy template. It should be something you can deploy and scale. We want to make sure Open SaaS is a production-ready starter that can be used to build real-world SaaS products. This means having a solid architecture, a clean codebase, and a set of features that are robust and ready to be used in production.

2. Modularity & flexibility

Different auth methods, billing providers, file uploads, AI integrations, analytics, and more. We want to make sure Open SaaS is a flexible and modular platform that can be tailored to the needs of (almost) any SaaS product. This means having the most essential features you need to launch your SaaS quickly, and being able to easily remove the things you don’t.

3. AI-first developer experience

Whether you use Cursor, VSCode + Copilot, Claude, or others, Open SaaS should have top-notch code quality and be able to “explain itself” well to AI-driven coding tools, making it enjoyable to develop with in 2026 and beyond.

We also want to provide demos and templates for AI-powered SaaS products, so you can get started building SaaS apps that leverage the newest technologies to create powerful and innovative products.

4. Community-powered evolution

We want Open SaaS to be shaped by real feedback, real PRs, and real use cases. Roadmap ideas are only valuable when they reflect what people actually need. So your feedback and contributions are important to us!

What’s in the roadmap

We just got finished with a major UI redesign, which we dubbed “Open SaaS v2.0”. Take a look at the announcement below.

With the new UI, based on Shadcn UI, finished and tucked away, we’ve turned back towards adding highly-requested features, and improving the codebase with smaller fixes.

1. Payment Provider Expansion

Today, Open SaaS supports Stripe, Polar, and Lemon Squeezy as payment providers. It’s super easy to get started with one — just plug and play.

Upcoming features:

Polar.sh integration (merged in #461)
Paddle, and additional gateways (especially regional-friendly options)
Supporting up- or down-grading between different billing plans and models (proration)

2. AI-First Workflows & Templates

Open SaaS already includes a simple OpenAI integration example, but we’re looking to expand and improve it.

Coming soon:

Exploring using Vercel’s AI SDK within our demo app (issue #567).
Cursor / Claude prompt presets for smoother onboarding (issue #579)
Creating better docs and guides for AI-powered SaaS development

3. Core Development Improvements

We want to keep Open SaaS relevant and up-to-date with the latest trends, as well as with the latest Wasp (the framework it’s built on) features and improvements .

Efforts underway:

Refactors, galore! E.g. removing any and as from the codebase, extracting SVGs, etc. (issue #568)
Improving OpenSaaS.sh development workflows (issue #552)
Improving e2e tests (issue #558)

How to Participate

So that’s just a quick overview of the current state of the roadmap. But we’re not done yet!

Open SaaS is community-driven — and we’d love your help.

⭐ Star the repo

This is super easy and helps a ton!

https://github.com/wasp-lang/open-saas

🧩 File issues or feature requests

Especially around real-world SaaS requirements you’re running into.

https://github.com/wasp-lang/open-saas/issues

🔧 Contribute code

If you’re interested in payments, dashboarding, AI workflows, or dev-experience improvements — we’ll happily support and guide.

https://github.com/orgs/wasp-lang/projects/6

🚀 Build with it

The best feedback always comes from people deploying real products. Drop us a line on Discord or Twitter and let us know what you’re building!

Roadmap Updates

We’ll keep updating this roadmap alongside major releases and aim for a quarterly revision cycle.

You can follow progress in the GitHub Project board:

👉 https://github.com/orgs/wasp-lang/projects/6

See you there!

Building a SaaS with Gemini 3 and Open SaaS

Nov 19, 2025

Vince

Dev Rel @ Wasp

I’m always skeptical of demos whenever a new model gets released. So I had to test Google’s new Gemini 3 model myself.

I wanted to give a more unfiltered look at some real-life SaaS development tasks with Gemini 3, Cursor and our very own Open SaaS boilerplate, so I recorded a quick video of the process.

The results were impressive and it was able to handle 3 tasks of increasing complexity. I’ll definitely be using this as my new go-to model for feature development in future projects!

Check out the full video below to see it in action:

Refactoring the Landing Page

I started with a fresh copy of the Open SaaS template and gave Gemini 3 a simple prompt: look at the demo AI app and update the landing page to reflect it.

Using Cursor’s “Plan Mode,” Gemini 3 proposed three different design styles. I chose an “interactive product-led demo” approach. The model generated a plan and executed it on the first try, building a custom interactive component and integrating it seamlessly into the existing landing page hero section.

This was a cool surprise, as I hand’t thought about building an interactive component to showcase the app’s features. A nice win!

Refactoring with Structured Outputs

Next, I ramped up the difficulty. The demo app originally used OpenAI’s function calling to generate a daily schedule. I asked Gemini 3 to refactor this to use OpenAI’s “Structured Outputs” feature instead.

The model:

Identified the need for a Zod schema to define the response format.
Switched the model to gpt-4o-mini.
Replaced the legacy tool definitions with the new response_format parameter.
Updated the parsing logic to handle the structured response.

This refactor modernized the codebase without breaking existing functionality. Nice. This saved me a ton of time reading the docs and figuring out how to use the new feature myself.

Adding a Collaborative Chat Interface

For the final test, we asked for a major feature addition: a chat interface to collaborate with the AI on the creating a daily plan (with subtasks) before committing to it.

Gemini 3 broke this down into a multi-step plan:

Backend: Define new schemas and actions to handle the chat history and plan proposals.
Frontend: Implement a chat component using shadcn/ui components (specifically the ScrollArea).
Integration: Connect the chat interface to the planning logic, allowing users to refine tasks (e.g., “prioritize filming the video”) before accepting the final schedule.

The result was a functional chat interface where the AI intelligently adjusted the schedule based on user feedback, embedded directly into the app. I loved how it injected a nice styled component into the chat window, something that I wanted (it read my mind!) and would have taken me hours to build in the past.

I was really happy with the results of this challenge!

Conclusion

The combination of Gemini 3, Cursor, and Open SaaS proved to be pretty powerful. The model didn’t just generate code; it understood the project structure (Open SaaS organizes code vertically by feature), followed architectural patterns, and successfully implemented complex refactors and new features with minimal human intervention.

Overall, I was very impressed and I think other SaaS builders would be smart to give this stack a go.

⭐️ Star Open SaaS repo and start building your next idea today!

Open SaaS v2.0 -- ShadCN UI, LLM-friendly, MoRs, and more.

Jul 29, 2025

Vince

Dev Rel @ Wasp

What could make a free, open-source, full-featured SaaS boilerplate even better? Probably a fresh new look on top the hottest UI library out there, plus a slew of new features.

Well, that’s exactly what we’ve done with Open SaaS v2.0.

Oh, and we’re launching it on Product Hunt, so go show your support for open-source SaaS dopeness! 🙏

The most significant change is a complete redesign using Shadcn UI, providing a more modern, consistent, and customizable experience out of the box. This update also includes key framework upgrades, new integrations, and significant codebase improvements to help you build your SaaS faster than ever.

You’re welcome.

New Look with Shadcn UI

People really love Open SaaS, but we knew from the start that if there were a way to improve it, than it would be to offer a better look and feel.

So we’ve done just that.

🧐 Here’s what it looked like before:

🔥 And here’s what it looks like now:

You probably noticed that the design is cleaner, more consistent, and offers more interactive elements. But it’s also completely redesigned on top of Shadcn UI (which is also open source!), so you get a modern, composable, and highly customizable experience out of the box.

On top of that, we’ve also made the styles easily themable, and in the future we’ll be offering a slick way to find and use a great looking theme, as well as a range of different Landing Page templates for you to choose from. So stay tuned for that!

Now on to the new features!

⭐️ Star the Open SaaS repo and support open-source tools for builders, by builders!

New Features

Lemon Squeezy, Polar, and Paddle Merchants of Record

Merchants of Record (MoR) are great. They’re a layer on top of payment processors like Stripe that take the pain out of the legalities and tax compliance of being a merchant.

We’ve added support for Lemon Squeezy with Polar integration in the works as we speak! Choose the payment processor that best fits your SaaS if Stripe is too granular for your needs.

And while we’re working on Polar right now, next up we’ll be adding support for Paddle as a MoR to satisfy the needs of the broader international indiehacker community.

LLM-friendly Docs and Rules

One of the best use cases for LLM-assisted coding is to get precise answers to your questions about a codebase or library. You can pass it the docs, ask your questions, and get context-aware answers.

So we’ve added an LLM-friendly version of the Open SaaS docs, as well as the Wasp framework docs, to make it easier for you to use in your AI coding environments.

Just add the following urls to your AI coding environment such as Cursor, Copilot, etc, and mention it in your prompt to get precise answers to your Open SaaS and Wasp framework questions.

Open SaaS AI-friendly docs:

https://docs.opensaas.sh/llms-full.txt

Wasp framework AI-friendly docs:

https://wasp.sh/llms-full.txt

In addition, we’ve also got a full set of project-specific Cursor rules files that you can use to make sure your AI assistants stay on the right track. These can be adapted to use with Claude Code, Windsurf, and more.

End-to-End Testing with Playwright

One thing I hate about building a SaaS is that I’m constantly worried it might break after adding a new feature. To give you peace of mind, we’ve integrated a full suite of end-to-end tests using Playwright. These tests act like a robot user, clicking through your app to verify that everything from user sign-ups to critical payment flows is working exactly as it should.

But we didn’t just write tests for ourselves. We’ve provided the entire setup, including a CI/CD workflow file for GitHub Actions. This means you can automatically run these checks on every code change, ensuring you never accidentally break your production app. Ship with confidence, knowing your core features are easily protected, and use our test suite as a foundation for your own custom test cases.

More Refactors & Improvements

On top of the headlining features, we’ve been busy shipping a ton of other improvements to make your life easier. We’ve squashed bugs, upgraded major dependencies like Node.js and the Wasp framework, and completely refactored the codebase for better organization. We also threw in some handy new integrations like enhanced file uploads with progress bars and a cookie consent banner. Here’s a quick rundown of other key changes:

New Features & Integrations 🚀:
- Enhanced File Uploads: The file upload functionality has been improved with features like progress bars and validation. The S3 CORS configuration was tightened for improved security.
- Cookie Consent: A cookie consent banner has been implemented.
Major Dependency and Framework Upgrades 🛠️:
- Wasp Framework: There have been multiple upgrades to the Wasp framework, moving from version 0.13.0 up to 0.16.0 and beyond. This indicates active maintenance and adoption of new Wasp features.
- SDKs: The AWS and OpenAI SDKs have been updated to their latest versions.
- Node.js: The environment has been updated to Node.js version 20.
Codebase Refactoring and Organization 🗂️:
- Vertical Reorganization: A major refactoring effort was undertaken to organize the codebase “vertically”. Functionality for features like auth, payments, users, and file-upload are now grouped together, improving modularity.
- User Management: Significant refactoring was done on the user management and administration pages.
Documentation and Content 📚:
- A substantial number of commits are related to adding new blog posts, updating documentation, and creating other content. This reflects a strong focus on community engagement and developer resources.

Help Us, Help You!

We’re not done yet. We’re going to keep listening to our commonunity and improving Open SaaS.

So if you’ve got ideas on how to improve it, please create a GitHub issue or submit a pull request.

Got a cool landing page variation? Submit a PR! Found a bug? Create an issue!

Want to support us? Star the repo on GitHub!

⭐️ Star the Open SaaS repo and support open-source tools for builders, by builders!

More Landing Page Templates

We’re working on a ton of new landing page templates for you to choose from. We’ll be adding more templates in the coming weeks and months, so keep an eye out for updates.

Here's my SaaS Cost, Profit, and Marketing Breakdown

May 21, 2025

Vince

Dev Rel @ Wasp

Hey builders,

I wanted to share my journey building a micro SaaS, CoverLetterGPT, which earns $550/month in recurring revenue (MRR), while requiring minimal effort and maintenance. Here’s a breakdown of overall costs, profit, how I got customers, and why I believe small, simple SaaS apps are an underrated way to start as an indie maker.

@hot_town_ Here’s a down of how much it cost me to run my SaaS app which is a simple GPT wrapper for generating cover letters. Overall, it’s been a decent little profit because the app doesn’t cost me much to run. #webdevelopment #sideproject #indiehackers #saas #ai ♬ original sound - Vinny

At a glance

CoverLetterGPT is a GPT wrapper that generates personalized cover letters based on the user’s uploaded CV and job description. The function that seperates it from just using chatGPT is that users can edit cover letters inline with AI assistance, as well as manage all the different cover letters they’ve generated. It’s super simple, and it’s even open-source! I launched it in August 2023 and it’s been a steady source of passive income since.

Here are some quick numbers:

Built in 1 week
- using Open SaaS, a free, open-source React, NodeJS, SaaS boilerplate template with tons of features.
Runs on autopilot
- ~1hr/month of maintenance
~$550 MRR
Minimal customer support
- Only 3 Stripe disputes to date
Costs ~$16/month
- ~$12 for hosting
- ~$3 for OpenAI API fees
- $11.82/year for the .xyz domain
$0 paid ads
- Just SEO and Social Media/Reddit

Costs Breakdown

Cost Type	Monthly Cost	Notes
App Hosting	$12	Railway.com
OpenAI API	$3	~1,500 requests / 1.5m tokens
Domain	$0.98	$11.82/year via Porkbun
Stripe Fees	~$45	~3% + 30¢/transaction + ~2% currency conversion

As you can see, Stripe fees are the biggest “cost” in the end, becuase most of my customers are abroad, so I get hit with extra cross-border fees. But that’s just the cost of doing business. Plus, I don’t really see these fees, so they dont bother me much.

Meanwhile, using the OpenAI API isn’t as expensive as you might think, and the models keep getting cheaper and better. I’m currently using the gpt-4o-mini model for the standard plan, and gpt-4.1 for the pro plan.

At about 1,500 requests/month, which equals roughly 1.5m input and output tokens, this costs me around $3/month.

Besides that, my hosting bill is about $12/month on Railway, and I pay $11.82/year for the .xyz domain via Porkbun.

Revenue & Profit Breakdown

Metric	Value	Notes
Avg. Monthly Revenue	$615	Past 8 months, converted from €543
Total Net Revenue	$9,912	Since launch, after Stripe fees
Total Costs to Date	$345	$15/month × 23 months
Avg. Monthly Profit	$416	$9,567 ÷ 23 months
Total Profit to Date 🎉	$9,567	Net revenue minus costs

At current exchange rates, my average monthly recurring revenue of €543 over the past 8 months equals

an average of $615 MRR for the past 8 months

My total revenue, minus ~$45/month Stripe fees, disputes, and refunds, since launch has been €8756. At current exchange rates, this equals

$9,912 total net revenue

My costs since launch 23 months ago have been ~$15/month. So 15 * 23 equals

$345 monthly costs

This brings my total profit since launch to

$9,567 total profit or
$416/month average profit

That’s enough to afford a lease on a nice Jeep Wrangler.

Not bad for a side project that I built in 1 week!

Marketing Breakdown

Channel	Effort Level	Return	Result / Notes
Product Hunt	High	Medium	Initial launch, created marketing assets, got early traction
Reddit	Medium-High	High	Posted in dev/entrepreneur/job subreddits, boosted SEO, some bans risk
Indie Hackers	Easy	Medium	Shared open-source story, featured in newsletter, good feedback
Twitter	Hard	Low	Shared updates, videos, and journey.
TikTok	Medium (Ongoing)	High	Shared updates, videos, and journey, helps maintain MRR.
Paid Ads	None	—	Did not run any paid ads

By far the question I get asked the most by other curious builders is how I got customers. Many ask if I paid for ads, and I didn’t.

Here’s what I did do:

Initial Product Hunt Launch

A lot of people aren’t sure if Product Hunt is worth it these days (spoiler: it still is!), but I’d say launch there anyway.

I wasn’t sure where to go with my app after I first built it, so Product Hunt seemed like a good start. The benefit of launching there, regardless of how the launch performed on the platform, was that it forced me to do a few important things.

First, I had to create good marketing materials for the launch, like videos, images, and marketing copy.

Then, with the launch coming up, I felt that I had to start telling people about it. I mean, there’s no point in launching and then not trying to get some upvotes and support, right?

This all lead to giving me a jump start on spreading the word about the app. It did decently well on product hunt, and gained some initial traction, but with that material I also went to other platforms to share it.

Reddit Posts and Comments

Posting on Reddit can be tricky. If you’re too forward, it gets seen as spam and you can get banned.

Luckily, I left the app open-source because I wasn’t anticipating much success from it, and a good side effect of this was that I was able to openly post about it on developer and entrepreneur subreddits. To this day, I think this had a good effect on SEO, but I’m not certain.

Besides that, I found job search subreddits and left comments on posts where people were asking about using AI to generate cover letters.

Indie Hackers

I also posted about it in the IndieHackers community and got great feedback, mainly due to the fact that it was open-source and starting to get good signup numbers.

This led to a getting featured in their newsletter—again, thanks to the app being open-source—and this led to a lot more buzz.

Twitter & tiktok

I also took to twitter and tiktok to share fun videos about the app, my journey building it, and my thoughts about it.

Doing this periodically and consistently throughout the past couple years has probably helped keep MRR consistent

What I’ve learned

This experience has been pretty interesting. I’ve defintiely had a bit of luck and good timing on my side, but I’ve also learned a lot about building a SaaS, marketing, and what tends to be good and bad advice out there.

So here’s my take on things.

Small, Persistent Wins Are Worth It

Many developers think a SaaS has to be big, flashy, or wildly profitable to be worth building. I disagree. For me:

$550/month is fantastic as side income.
Revenue has been surprisingly stable.
It runs itself, requiring virtually no maintenance.
I can balance it easily alongside my full-time job.
It’s fun and doesn’t consume my free time.

I would encourage anyone who wants to build a SaaS to go for it, but to aim for small, achievable SaaS projects instead of trying to “hit it big” from the start.

Build & Launch Fast

The most important lesson I’ve learned: speed is everything. The faster you launch, the faster you’ll know if your idea works. Here’s what worked for me:

Avoid long, drawn-out failures: Build small, execute early.
Use the fastest tools available: I used Open SaaS because it gives me all the building blocks already set up (auth, Stripe payments, OpenAI API examples, email sending, etc), letting me focus on the business logic of the app.
Forget perfection: I didn’t worry about making it pretty or perfect—-it just had to work.

Keep It Simple

The beauty of a simple, “micro SaaS” is in its simplicity. Here’s why:

My app does one thing well: generating cover letters based on résumés and job descriptions and allows users to edit them inline with AI assistance.
There’s no need for a fancy landing page or marketing gimmicks. This is my 🌶 hot take. I mean, my landing page is my app! Users land on it and can instantly try it out.
Users get 3 trial credits-—enough to try the app and see value before paying.

One of the biggest perks of small SaaS is how low-maintenance it can be. With CoverLetterGPT, I rarely handle customer service thanks to its simplicity and the low, but consistent number of users (~100).

This means I spend my time on new ideas rather than maintaining old ones.

It’s All About Tradeoffs

While I could optimize and grow CoverLetterGPT further, I’ve chosen to keep it small and simple. For me:

Small wins are still wins.
I value having a side project that’s easy to manage alongside my full-time job.
I’d rather have less stress than chase higher profits.

Final Thoughts

If you’re considering building a SaaS, don’t overthink it. Start small, move fast, and treat it as an experiment. Forget the “rules” and focus on launching. Here’s what matters most:

Keep it simple: Build an app that solves one problem well.
Launch fast: Test your idea and iterate based on real feedback.
Minimize effort: Aim for maximum reward with minimal maintenance. If you’re spending months on it before people can try it, you’re probably working on the wrong initial idea.

For me, $550 MRR isn’t just “enough”—it’s amazing. It’s proof that small, focused apps can succeed, and they’re a great way to build confidence and skills as a maker.

Product Hunt doesn't really work, but you should still use it to launch your product

May 7, 2025

Matija

CEO @ Wasp

Many of us have been launching on Product Hunt for a while, and more and more folks have started questioning whether the audience there is genuine and whether it is still worth launching on their platform.

Being fresh out of our latest launch from a week ago, I wanted to share here our first-hand experience and cover three main things:

How does launching on Product Hunt look and feel today
What we got from the launch
How to make (the best) use of Product Hunt for your product

About us - launched 6x, >2,000 upvotes

We’ve launched 6 times on Product Hunt in the last 4 years, won “Top Product” awards (#1 and #5 of the day), and collected over 2,000 upvotes in total. Our last launch was with Open SaaS - an open-source alternative to $300+ SaaS starters.

You will find many articles with advice for launching on PH, and winning stories from those who got featured, but almost nobody shares behind-the-scenes knowledge and what it really took to get there. That is the purpose of this post.

I will guide you through the steps of the launch and comment and share our experiences from each of them. Let’s get started:

Scheduling your launch and creating a “Coming soon” teaser - “let’s exchange upvotes”

Once you schedule your Product Hunt launch, you can create a banner to appear on their “Coming soon” page (https://www.producthunt.com/coming-soon), and this is where your journey starts. This gives PH visitors an opportunity to see what’s coming next and to subscribe to get notified once it launches, and it is also the first thing you can use for marketing your launch.

This is also when the PH economy starts - as soon as you publish your launch teaser, you will start receiving offers to exchange upvotes with other people launching their products soon:

This is actually a legitimate strategy (in the sense of shared incentives and not buying votes) that can probably be utilized pretty efficiently via automation. It won’t bring any qualified leads (aka people genuinely interested in your product), but it might help with the upvotes, resulting in the increased visibility and reach of your launch.

We haven’t used this strategy at all (so I cannot testify to its efficiency), since we published our “Coming soon” page quite late, just a day or two before the launch, and we also didn’t have the workflow in place nor manpower to pull it off.

There are also specialized groups on Linkedin, WhatsApp, and other platforms for PH participants to support each other in this way. If you join these, you will, expectedly so, receive even more such messages and requests.

Launch day - unsolicited emails and “buy upvotes” offers

On the launch day, the requests like the one above intensified. I even got several emails from others launching products on the same day asking for an upvote, as they scraped my email and added me to their newsletter.

First 4 hours of the day - hidden upvotes

Product Hunt recently introduced the feature of showing the products in the randomized order, with the upvote count hidden, for the first 4 hours of the day. The idea behind this is to guarantee all products have equal visibility at the start and a fair chance to grab the attention of the audience.

With our latest launch, Open SaaS, we had the best opening ever - 100 upvotes in 4 hours!

We, of course, engaged our network, but also noticed a lot of upvotes and comments from the people we don’t personally know. With such a strong start, I was quite confident we secured our place in the top 5 products on the leaderboard.

Being in the top 5 products is an “above the fold” position on Product Hunt’s home page, so getting there early is the best way to end up there.

But when the leaderboard was finally revealed, Open SaaS was barely in the top 10 launches of the day!

There was a quite noticeable cut-off between the first five places and the rest, and the product in the first place had almost double the upvotes than the second one. That was fairly demotivating for us as it felt like we had literally zero chance of catching up.

”Hey, wanna buy some upvotes?”

After the leaderboard reveal, we started receiving another type of message - direct offers to buy upvotes. Being still relatively close to being in the top 5 products probably made us a highly qualified lead:

A slight variation of this is having different social media influencers and community owners reach out and offer to market your launch to their followers, promising X upvotes:

Even some of our direct contacts knew “a guy” that could get you to the top of Product Hunt and offered to intro us, so it kinda started feeling like a “public secret”, and us being the rare ones who didn’t know about it.

The main benefit of our PH launch wasn’t the launch itself, but rather the fact we could combine it with other things, like launching Open SaaS on HackerNews, where it ended up being featured for about half a day (and much longer on Show HN tab).

Finally, all that engagement combined allowed us to get trending globally on GitHub, which in turn brought in even more traffic to Open SaaS (today, a week after launching, it has over 2.5k stars).

The resulting traffic

Taking a look at the traffic that was brought to Open SaaS’s repo in the last two weeks, here’s what we can observe:

HackerNews launch brought in more than 3 times more people than Product Hunt. GitHub brought even fewer people to the actual repo, but my gut feeling is that many more of them starred it without leaving the Trending page.

Open SaaS ended the launch as the #7 product of the day, with about ~400 upvotes. The top 10 products of the day end up in a daily newsletter that has over 500,000 subscribers, according to the Product Hunt.

The newsletter starts with 3 big promotional blocks, so you must scroll quite a bit to reach the top products of the previous day.

For us, it didn’t make a huge dent, I think it got us about 20 upvotes. Maybe it was due to the fact we weren’t number one, or simply because it’s quite a deep funnel (open email → scroll all the way down → check all the products → like Open SaaS → decide to upvote it).

Is it even possible to win #1 of the day without any boosting strategies?

Yes, it is definitely still possible. I’ve had it confirmed by a couple of contacts that I trust and who won #1 with their products, without any bots or paying for upvotes. But it’s also definitely become less common and less predictable.

Most of the times we were launching, the product in the first place exhibited some unusual behavior. Once, it was the company that launched the week before, but they just slightly rebranded the product and the website and re-launched it. Another time, a product received a very sudden spike in upvotes just hours before the end of the launch.

So, what does all this mean? Is it still worth launching on Product Hunt?

It is obvious that today, there are different forces and incentives driving the behavior of Product Hunt users from both sides. Initially, there was a community that wanted to learn about the latest products and express their interest, and there were founders that wanted to connect to that community.

Now, there are also creators who foremost want their product to win, no matter the actual audience engagement, as they believe that will help them with their end goal - e.g., reach, fundraising, or social validation towards other users. And there is obviously a side willing to fulfill that demand without having any real interest in the product.

Why is that possible? Product Hunt is taking a lot of measures to detect and prevent such behavior, but it is hard to do it without severely limiting the network effect (aka being able to share your launch link around) that Product Hunt is going for.

Besides all that, for us it is still worth it to regularly launch on Product Hunt. Here’s why.

Product Hunt is an amazing excuse

Product Hunt gives you a unique opportunity to declare an “official” launch of your product. You can decide on which day you want to do it, schedule it, and it’s 100% going to be there for everybody to see, and for you to share and invite people to check it out. You get 24 hours, during which it is fully justifiable to contact everyone you know (and beyond) and keep tooting your horn.

You can’t do that with other high-reach platforms such as Reddit, and HackerNews. You are, of course, free to share the news about your product at any time, but there is no guarantee that anybody will see it (quite the opposite, actually) unless the collective mind of the community decides so, which is all but deterministic. You could easily spend a week preparing your launch post just for it to get drowned by the algorithm in minutes.

That’s why we look at Product Hunt not as the final goal (winning #1) but as simply a part of our overall launch process. It’s a great podium to be standing on, and a good excuse to talk about your product, and anything else on top is just a bonus.

We keep it simple

You will find a lot of articles (and paid courses) from “PH gurus”, explaining how you should prepare your launch months in advance, warm up your audience, prepare comments they will share, etc. We don’t do any of that. We just prepare the content (video + a few screenshots, and an intro comment), and, on the day of the launch, invite everyone we know to support us. Then, during the day, we also post on Reddit, Hackernews, and dev.to.

Sometimes we end up in the top 5, sometimes we don’t, but every time, we get a solid uptick in user engagement, and usually something much better follows in the next days/weeks. For example, MAGE, our GPT-powered full-stack app starter, exploded after its PH launch and has been used to create over 30,000 projects in a few months.

We do it often

Our goal is to launch on Product Hunt every 3 months as a part of our Launch Week, and that’s what we’ve done so far. You cannot really launch the exact same product unless 6 months have passed or there’s been a significant update, but you are free to launch other (sub)products and features connected to your main product.

💡 Hint: when you submit a launch, you can ask the PH team to “connect” it to your product so it will appear in a list of launches for that product. Often, they do it on their own. It will look like this:

Although our main product is Wasp, a full-stack framework on top of React & Node.js, here’s what we launched so far:

Wasp Alpha - pure product, v0 pretty much
Wasp Beta - almost two years later, we haven’t yet adopted the “launch often” approach
Free SaaS template - a predecessor of Open SaaS, 4 months later
*MAGE, GPT Web App Generator* - a full-stack web app generator powered by Wasp
Full-stack auth for React/Node, no 3rd party services - Wasp’s auth feature
And finally, Open SaaS - A free, open-source alternative to $300+ React & Node.js SaaS starters

It’s become a regular part of our launch workflow, and for whatever new feature(s) we introduce in that quarter, we’ll look for a good candidate to showcase in the upcoming launch. That allows us to keep talking about what we do, and we also get a lot of good content (e.g., videos, banners) that we can embed in our docs, blog posts, etc.

For example, this is a video showing how auth works in Wasp - first we used it for our Product Hunt launch, and now it lives at the top of our auth docs.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading this far! This turned out to be quite a bit longer post than I initially expected, but I just kept getting more ideas on what to write about. I hope you will find it helpful for planning your next launch and that you will also know a bit better what to expect along the way.

I would also love to get your feedback and hear about your experiences and strategies for launching on Product Hunt.

Happy launching!

Blog

Why a roadmap?

How it works

Guiding themes

1. Real-world launch readiness

2. Modularity & flexibility

3. AI-first developer experience

4. Community-powered evolution

What’s in the roadmap

1. Payment Provider Expansion

2. AI-First Workflows & Templates

3. Core Development Improvements

How to Participate

⭐ Star the repo

🧩 File issues or feature requests

🔧 Contribute code

🚀 Build with it

Roadmap Updates

Refactoring the Landing Page

Refactoring with Structured Outputs

Adding a Collaborative Chat Interface

Conclusion

New Look with Shadcn UI

New Features

Lemon Squeezy, Polar, and Paddle Merchants of Record

LLM-friendly Docs and Rules

End-to-End Testing with Playwright

More Refactors & Improvements

Help Us, Help You!

More Landing Page Templates

At a glance

Costs Breakdown

Revenue & Profit Breakdown

Marketing Breakdown

Initial Product Hunt Launch

Reddit Posts and Comments

Indie Hackers

Twitter & tiktok

What I’ve learned

Small, Persistent Wins Are Worth It

Build & Launch Fast

Keep It Simple

It’s All About Tradeoffs

Final Thoughts

About us - launched 6x, >2,000 upvotes

Scheduling your launch and creating a “Coming soon” teaser - “let’s exchange upvotes”

Launch day - unsolicited emails and “buy upvotes” offers

First 4 hours of the day - hidden upvotes

”Hey, wanna buy some upvotes?”

What we got from the launch - #7, HN front page, trending on GitHub, …

The resulting traffic

Getting featured in PH’s daily newsletter - does it help?

Is it even possible to win #1 of the day without any boosting strategies?

So, what does all this mean? Is it still worth launching on Product Hunt?

Product Hunt is an amazing excuse

We keep it simple

We do it often

Thanks for reading!