Which Product Hunt categories still get noticed?
Products for builders. Since January 2025, launches in Development, Mac, No-Code, Audio and Open Source reached 100 votes 7% to 11% of the time, against 2.9% for all launches. SaaS managed 2%, and Finance, Home, Crypto and Web3 under 1%. Odds for 59 categories.
Syed Asif Sultan · every number regenerable from the repository
The short answer: products for builders. Since January 2025, Product Hunt launches tagged Development reached 100 votes 10.85% of the time, Mac 8.96%, No-Code 7.92% and Open Source 7.04%, against 2.87% for all launches. At the other end, launches tagged Home, Finance, Crypto and Web3 got there less than 1% of the time. SaaS, a tag many founders selling software reach for, got there 1.98% of the time, below average, and it now has 1,700 launches a month, 13.3 times as many as in 2022. If what you’ve built is for developers and makers, Product Hunt is still worth a real effort. If it’s a money, home, health or travel product, the odds are a third of that or worse.
These are Product Hunt’s own counts, through its API: for the 59 categories that ordinary launches use most, how many launches each had, how many Product Hunt featured on its homepage, and how many reached 100 votes, from January 2025 to 27 October 2026, compared with 2022.
The odds in every category
Each row is the launches tagged with that category from January 2025 to October 2026, best odds first. The range is the 95% range for the odds, so you can see where the gap between two categories is too small to mean anything.
| Category | Launches a month | Featured | Reached 100 votes | 95% range | Featured that reached 100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Development | 94 | 13.1% | 10.85% | 9.58 to 12.26% | 82.3% |
| Mac | 150 | 18.3% | 8.96% | 8.04 to 9.99% | 49% |
| No-Code | 130 | 9.1% | 7.92% | 6.99 to 8.97% | 86.1% |
| Audio | 133 | 9.8% | 7.35% | 6.46 to 8.35% | 74.7% |
| Open Source | 499 | 10.6% | 7.04% | 6.57 to 7.53% | 66.5% |
| Software Engineering | 171 | 8.9% | 6.71% | 5.95 to 7.55% | 74.4% |
| Video | 206 | 7.6% | 5.76% | 5.12 to 6.48% | 76.1% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 3,751 | 7.3% | 5.48% | 5.33 to 5.64% | 74.5% |
| Data & Analytics | 109 | 7.1% | 5.35% | 4.52 to 6.33% | 74.7% |
| Developer Tools | 1,842 | 7.2% | 4.91% | 4.7 to 5.12% | 67.4% |
| Bots | 87 | 6.3% | 4.82% | 3.95 to 5.88% | 75.8% |
| 152 | 6.2% | 4.67% | 4.01 to 5.44% | 75% | |
| Sales | 248 | 4.9% | 4.07% | 3.58 to 4.63% | 80.6% |
| GitHub | 1,038 | 6.7% | 4.02% | 3.78 to 4.29% | 59.9% |
| Task Management | 258 | 5% | 3.7% | 3.24 to 4.22% | 72.6% |
| Writing | 260 | 4.7% | 3.46% | 3.02 to 3.97% | 72% |
| Notion | 48 | 4.3% | 3.43% | 2.49 to 4.71% | 80% |
| Chrome Extensions | 369 | 5.1% | 3.39% | 3.01 to 3.8% | 65.8% |
| iOS | 341 | 4.9% | 3.04% | 2.67 to 3.45% | 62.3% |
| Messaging | 184 | 4.6% | 3.02% | 2.54 to 3.6% | 66.3% |
| Productivity | 3,555 | 4.4% | 2.94% | 2.82 to 3.06% | 66.3% |
| Design Tools | 930 | 3.9% | 2.94% | 2.71 to 3.18% | 74.8% |
| Analytics | 360 | 4% | 2.92% | 2.57 to 3.31% | 72.2% |
| Languages | 151 | 4.2% | 2.77% | 2.26 to 3.38% | 65.9% |
| Music | 209 | 4.6% | 2.76% | 2.32 to 3.27% | 59.7% |
| Online Learning | 126 | 3.1% | 2.53% | 2.01 to 3.19% | 81.4% |
| Marketing | 1,289 | 3% | 2.51% | 2.33 to 2.7% | 82.1% |
| SEO | 287 | 2.7% | 2.35% | 2 to 2.75% | 85.5% |
| User Experience | 463 | 3.2% | 2.29% | 2.02 to 2.6% | 71.9% |
| Community | 128 | 2.8% | 2.21% | 1.73 to 2.82% | 74.7% |
| Hiring | 212 | 2.5% | 2.17% | 1.79 to 2.62% | 84.6% |
| Security | 208 | 3.7% | 2.17% | 1.78 to 2.63% | 58.3% |
| Social Media | 550 | 2.7% | 2.06% | 1.82 to 2.33% | 75.6% |
| SaaS | 1,700 | 2.7% | 1.98% | 1.84 to 2.12% | 72.3% |
| YouTube | 129 | 2.8% | 1.8% | 1.37 to 2.36% | 65.4% |
| Health | 167 | 2.3% | 1.72% | 1.35 to 2.19% | 72.9% |
| Tech | 922 | 2.5% | 1.69% | 1.52 to 1.88% | 67% |
| Books | 99 | 2.2% | 1.61% | 1.16 to 2.24% | 74.5% |
| Privacy | 338 | 2.9% | 1.59% | 1.33 to 1.9% | 54.2% |
| Photography | 254 | 2.4% | 1.52% | 1.23 to 1.88% | 63.9% |
| Health & Fitness | 647 | 2.2% | 1.48% | 1.3 to 1.69% | 67.4% |
| Travel | 272 | 2.1% | 1.44% | 1.16 to 1.77% | 67.7% |
| Lifestyle | 134 | 2.1% | 1.43% | 1.06 to 1.93% | 66.7% |
| Career | 234 | 1.6% | 1.42% | 1.13 to 1.78% | 86.6% |
| Education | 842 | 2% | 1.4% | 1.24 to 1.58% | 69.4% |
| Fintech | 495 | 1.9% | 1.4% | 1.19 to 1.63% | 72.5% |
| Games | 443 | 2.1% | 1.4% | 1.18 to 1.65% | 66.5% |
| Android | 870 | 1.8% | 1.21% | 1.06 to 1.37% | 66.2% |
| E-Commerce | 382 | 1.7% | 1.21% | 1 to 1.47% | 72.1% |
| Investing | 188 | 1.6% | 1.16% | 0.88 to 1.54% | 72.7% |
| Business | 137 | 1.4% | 1.06% | 0.75 to 1.49% | 74.4% |
| Freelance | 134 | 1% | 0.88% | 0.6 to 1.29% | 89.7% |
| Web App | 283 | 1.2% | 0.87% | 0.67 to 1.13% | 70.1% |
| Personal Finance | 174 | 1.3% | 0.86% | 0.61 to 1.21% | 68.8% |
| Money | 121 | 1.2% | 0.83% | 0.55 to 1.25% | 71% |
| Web3 | 166 | 1.5% | 0.8% | 0.56 to 1.14% | 51.9% |
| Crypto | 134 | 1.2% | 0.64% | 0.41 to 1% | 55.9% |
| Finance | 205 | 1.1% | 0.62% | 0.43 to 0.89% | 58.3% |
| Home | 115 | 1% | 0.48% | 0.27 to 0.83% | 48% |
A launch can have several categories, so a launch tagged both Developer Tools and Open Source counts in both, and the rows don’t add up to the total. For all launches together: 13,006 a month, 4.1% featured, 2.87% reached 100 votes, and 69.4% of featured launches did.
It’s mostly about who gets featured
Look at the last two columns of the table together. How often a category reaches 100 votes follows how often Product Hunt features it: 18.3% of Mac launches were featured and 13.1% of Development launches, against 2.7% for SaaS and 1% for Home. Once a launch is featured, the category matters much less. In most categories, between 60% and 82% of featured launches reached 100 votes. Being featured is the whole game, as I showed in Does Product Hunt still work?, and some categories get featured far more often than others.
There are a few exceptions where people saw the launch and didn’t vote. Mac launches were featured more than any other category, but only 49% of featured Mac launches reached 100 votes. Privacy (54.2%), Web3 (51.9%), Crypto (55.9%) and Home (48%) were low on both counts: rarely featured, and rarely voted for when they were.
Product Hunt’s audience is builders
My reading of the table is simple. The people who browse and vote on Product Hunt are mostly people who build things: developers, designers, makers, founders. Products for them, like developer tools, open-source projects, no-code builders and Mac apps, get featured more and voted for more. Products for everyone else, like money apps, home, games, fitness and travel, rarely get either, however good they are. That’s not a judgement on those products. It’s a mismatch between who they’re for and who’s in the room.
AI is the interesting middle case. It’s the biggest category by far, with 3,751 launches a month, 21.4 times as many as in 2022, and still reached 100 votes 5.48% of the time, above average. A lot of AI launches are tools for builders, and Product Hunt’s audience is curious about them.
SaaS and Productivity are the crowded middle
Two categories hold most of the launches founders like the ones reading this would make. Productivity has 3,555 launches a month and SaaS 1,700. Both were featured less than 5% of the time and reached 100 votes about as often as the average launch or less: 2.94% and 1.98%. SaaS grew 13.3 times over since 2022, more than any category with over 1,000 launches a month except AI, and in 2022 Product Hunt featured 51% of them. Now it features 2.7%.
That’s what “crowded” looks like in numbers. If your launch is a SaaS tool for small businesses, you’re one of about 57 launches tagged SaaS each day, and about one of them a day reaches 100 votes.
Every category got harder, almost
Here are the odds of reaching 100 votes in 2022 and since January 2025, for some of the categories founders use most:
| Category | Launches a month, 2022 | Launches a month, 2025 to 2026 | Reached 100 votes, 2022 | Reached 100 votes, 2025 to 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Development | 18 | 94 | 11.26% | 10.85% |
| Open Source | 34 | 499 | 27.7% | 7.04% |
| No-Code | 37 | 130 | 35.04% | 7.92% |
| Mac | 19 | 150 | 30.97% | 8.96% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 175 | 3,751 | 20.88% | 5.48% |
| Developer Tools | 334 | 1,842 | 16.8% | 4.91% |
| Productivity | 724 | 3,555 | 14.8% | 2.94% |
| SaaS | 128 | 1,700 | 23.72% | 1.98% |
| Marketing | 273 | 1,289 | 13.64% | 2.51% |
| Fintech | 57 | 495 | 16.72% | 1.4% |
| Web3 | 72 | 166 | 18.12% | 0.8% |
| Crypto | 61 | 134 | 15.14% | 0.64% |
Development is the one category whose odds held: 11.26% in 2022, 10.85% now. Everything else fell, most by two-thirds or more. No-Code went from 35.04% to 7.92% and Mac from 30.97% to 8.96%, so even the best categories now are worse than the average category was in 2022. Development is also small, about 94 launches a month, so it may simply be a niche that hasn’t been found yet.
What I’d do
- Be honest about who it’s for. Adding the Development tag to a budgeting app won’t make developers want it. The useful question isn’t which tag gets votes. It’s whether the people who vote on Product Hunt are the people who’d use what you built.
- If you build for builders, take Product Hunt seriously. A Development, Open Source or No-Code launch has two to four times the average odds. Prepare for it properly: the timing in What’s the best day to launch on Product Hunt? and the vote targets in How many upvotes does it take to top Product Hunt?
- If you don’t, treat it as a footnote. A finance, home, health or travel product has odds under 2%, often under 1%. Launch if you like the badge and the backlink, but spend the weeks around it where your buyers already are.
- If you’re in SaaS or Productivity, narrow down. Those tags are crowded. Pick the narrower categories that describe the job your product does (Email, Sales, Writing, Task Management all did better than SaaS as a whole) and write the launch for the specific people who need it.
- Look up your own category first. The download below has all 59, year by year since 2022.
What I can’t tell you
A category is what the maker picked, and products in different categories differ in many ways besides the tag. So this shows which kinds of products do well on Product Hunt, not that changing your tags would change your odds. Categories overlap, and the vote counts use the first five categories listed on each launch; about 2% of launches with 100 or more votes list five, so a few may have more that weren’t counted. Small categories have wide ranges, so check the 95% range before reading much into a gap between two of them.
How I did it
I took the 59 categories used most by ordinary launches (every launch on the 15th of each month since 2022) and, for each one and each year, asked Product Hunt’s public API (GraphQL, version 2) how many launches were tagged with it and how many of those were featured. Separately, I collected every launch since 2022 that reached 100 votes, with its categories, and counted them by category and year. Odds are launches with 100 or more votes divided by all launches in the category. Votes and featured status are as of 27 October 2026. “Now” is January 2025 to 27 October 2026, 22 months. The 95% ranges are Wilson intervals.
Get the data
Every number on this page is free to quote. The download has what I worked from, so you can check your own launch against it:
- 59 categories, year by year since 2022: how many launches, how many were featured, and the odds of reaching 100 and 500 votes. Find out whether your category is crowded before you pick it.
- Every day since January 2022: launches, featured launches, how many reached 100, 250 and 500 votes, and the votes of the day’s 1st, 3rd, 5th and 10th most-voted launch.
- Every month, with the share of featured launches that reached 100 votes.
- The 68 founders’ launch write-ups: rank, votes, visitors, sign-ups, paying customers and whether it lasted, with a link to each post.
Leave your email and it downloads straight away (a zip of four CSVs and a README). You’ll also get the newsletter when I publish the next one of these.
Cite as: GTM for One (gtmforone.com), “Which Product Hunt categories still get noticed?”, https://www.gtmforone.com/blog/which-product-hunt-categories-get-noticed.
I’m building GTM for One for products whose buyers aren’t on Product Hunt: working out who would actually want what you’ve made, and writing to them one at a time.
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