# Flamas

> Flamas is a product launch platform for solo founders and indie makers. Submit your SaaS, ride a daily community leaderboard driven by upvotes, and earn a backlink to your site. A lightweight, founder-friendly alternative to Product Hunt.

Flamas lets founders launch for free (join the queue) or spend 29 credits (1 credit = $1) to schedule an exact date, test taglines on the day, keep the contacts of people who ask to be reached, and include a relaunch. Credits are prepaid and spent on premium launches, relaunches, contacts and placements. There is no subscription. A free AI writes your listing from your product URL. Money never buys leaderboard rank, and it never buys a backlink: a dofollow link is earned by claiming the listing and keeping the site answering, and it costs nothing.

## Core pages
- [Home](https://flamas.io/): the daily leaderboard of launching products
- [About](https://flamas.io/about): what Flamas is and who it's for
- [How it works](https://flamas.io/how-it-works): the launch flow, step by step
- [Pricing](https://flamas.io/pricing): free launch, or prepaid credits (premium launch = 29 credits)
- [Press](https://flamas.io/press): briefings on notable launches for journalists and writers, and which public pages to cite
- [Weekly digest](https://flamas.io/newsletter): the week's most upvoted launches in one email, no account needed
- [FAQ](https://flamas.io/faq): common questions about launching, the queue, and backlinks
- [Launch your product](https://flamas.io/launch/new): start a new launch

## Discover
- [Wanted](https://flamas.io/wants): problems people posted that they would pay to have answered, with how many people want each one and their budget. Makers enter a product against one; the people reading vote on which fits, and a 30-day race decides it.
- [Still alive](https://flamas.io/still-alive): launched products that still respond to scheduled uptime checks months later, oldest first
- [The graveyard](https://flamas.io/graveyard): listed products whose sites stopped responding, with the date they died
- [The board by period](https://flamas.io/?period=week): the same daily board filtered by period, via ?period=today, week, month or all-time
- [AI](https://flamas.io/category/ai): Artificial intelligence tools
- [Analytics](https://flamas.io/category/analytics): Measure what happens
- [Design](https://flamas.io/category/design): Design and creative
- [Developer Tools](https://flamas.io/category/developer-tools): For people who ship
- [Finance](https://flamas.io/category/finance): Money, billing and accounting
- [Marketing](https://flamas.io/category/marketing): Growth and marketing
- [No-Code](https://flamas.io/category/no-code): Build without code
- [Productivity](https://flamas.io/category/productivity): Get more done

## Blog
Launch results and guides to the tools that solve specific problems, written from Flamas's own launch, liveness and demand data.
- [All posts](https://flamas.io/blog): the full index ([RSS](https://flamas.io/blog/rss.xml))
- [How to build an audience before you launch (a solo founder's playbook)](https://flamas.io/blog/build-an-audience-before-you-launch): Launch day is quiet when nobody's waiting. Here's a no-budget playbook to line up your first users before you ship.

## Case studies
Evidence-backed case studies on why discoverability drives views and revenue for solo founders. Every figure is sourced to public research.
- [All case studies](https://flamas.io/case-studies): the full index
- [The distribution gap: why building a great product is not enough](https://flamas.io/case-studies/the-distribution-gap): 96.55% of web pages get zero traffic from Google. The bottleneck for solo founders is no longer building, it is being found. Here is the data on why discoverability, not code, decides who wins.
- [What a launch actually returns: traffic, signups, and a backlink](https://flamas.io/case-studies/what-a-launch-returns): A top-three launch drives 5,000 to 15,000 visitors and hundreds of signups in a day, plus a high-authority backlink that pays out for months. Here is the payoff, quantified by rank and traced through the funnel.
- [Backlinks to rankings to revenue: why one link changes everything](https://flamas.io/case-studies/backlinks-to-rankings): The #1 Google result has 3.8x more backlinks than positions two to ten, and pages with no links are almost never found. Here is why a single high-authority backlink is the highest-leverage asset a new product can earn.
- [The new front door: getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews](https://flamas.io/case-studies/ai-search-and-geo): AI search traffic grew 16x from 2024 to 2026, and AI Overviews cut clicks to the top result by 58%. As search becomes a synthesized answer, being the source an AI cites is the new page-one ranking.
- [Launch day is a spike; the listing is an annuity](https://flamas.io/case-studies/spike-versus-annuity): About 60% of a launch's traffic arrives in the first 24 hours, and a non-top-three page is dead by day 14. The durable value is the backlink and ranking that keep paying for months. Here is the difference, quantified.
- [Trust signals and badges: the conversion multiplier for unknown products](https://flamas.io/case-studies/trust-signals-and-badges): Products with five or more reviews are 270% more likely to be purchased, and trust badges near a CTA have lifted conversion 42% for first-time visitors. For an unknown product, borrowed credibility is the cheapest growth lever there is.
- [The real cost of getting discovered: DIY, done-for-you, or self-serve](https://flamas.io/case-studies/cost-of-getting-discovered): Manual submission to 100+ directories takes about 60 hours, done-for-you services charge $99 to $199, and a Flamas premium launch costs $29. Here is the ROI math on money, time, and what you actually keep.
- [The flywheel: how aggregated launches compound into authority](https://flamas.io/case-studies/the-discoverability-flywheel): Site-level authority correlates with rankings, and a mature launch directory can reach domain authority around 91. That means every listing inherits ranking power a lonely new domain never has. Here is the loop that builds it.
- [Timing and momentum: when you launch decides how much you rank](https://flamas.io/case-studies/timing-and-momentum): Launching at the day's start gives you 24 hours to rank instead of 12, and the first four hours set the trajectory the algorithm rewards. Timing is free to get right and costly to get wrong. Here is how to play it.
- [From views to revenue: the discoverability funnel, with the math](https://flamas.io/case-studies/from-views-to-revenue): Every 1,000 visitors yields about 90 signups and roughly 5 paying customers for a freemium product. Put a price on that last stage and views become a revenue model. Here is the full funnel, with real benchmarks.

## Developers
- [Developer Hub](https://flamas.io/developers): the free, read-only Public Data API (daily top launches, leaderboards, award winners, categories, stats). Attribution required.
- [OpenAPI spec](https://flamas.io/api/v1/openapi.json): machine-readable API description.
- [MCP server](https://flamas.io/api/mcp): Model Context Protocol endpoint (JSON-RPC over HTTP). Tools: search_products, get_product, top_launches, list_wants. AI assistants can query Flamas live instead of relying on a crawl.

## Key facts
- A backlink is earned, never sold. A listing starts nofollow and becomes dofollow once its owner has proved the domain, the site has answered our checks for 30 days, and a launch day has passed. It reverts the day the site stops answering.
- The daily launch day resets at 08:00 UTC.
- Ranking is by community upvotes; paying does not buy rank.
- Every premium launch includes one free relaunch; extra relaunches cost 15 credits.
- Pricing is prepaid credits (1 credit = $1), no subscription.

## What makes Flamas different
- **Every listing has a pulse.** Flamas pings each listed product's site on a schedule and publishes the result: alive (with how long), unstable, or dead (with the date). A site that stops answering loses its dofollow link. No other launch platform publishes whether its listings still work.
- **Wants: the demand side.** People post problems they would pay to have answered; every new launch is scored against the open ones and the people who asked get told. The launch board is supply; the wants board is demand. Posting, browsing and +1'ing wants is free. A want with a candidate becomes a 30-day race: anyone signed in votes on which product fits, "nothing here fits" is a real option, and nothing is awarded unless a candidate clears an absolute vote floor and beats that veto. Nobody decides it alone, including the person who asked. Someone who +1s a want may also consent to be emailed by whoever answers it; only the product that WINS can unlock those contacts, for credits. Consent is revocable and a withdrawal removes the person from an already-purchased list. A want that ends with no winner is published as demand nothing served, which is a finding in its own right.
- **Interest, not just upvotes.** Visitors can tell a maker "I'd actually try this" and optionally share their email. Makers get consented contacts, not only a vote count. Consent is revocable at any time.
- **Launch day is an experiment.** A launch can run up to three tagline variants across visitors and get per-variant click-through back, so the founder learns which copy converts regardless of where they ranked.
- **AI visibility is measured.** Flamas asks a grounded model a set of buyer questions before a launch and again at 30 and 90 days, and reports whether the product got named. Measured, not promised.