How Much Does It Cost to Hit #1 on Product Hunt in 2026?

I recently posted a product on Product Hunt. It did not do very well at all, but I'm not bothered by that. I signed up for the site in 2017 and while I have about 160 followers there, I imagine most of them are extremely stale and never visit the site.

What was interesting to me was how many people contacted me after I posted, offering to boost this launch or future ones. I knew that having a strong network of people willing to upvote your product was a common strategy, but I had never really considered paid services. It does make sense, and I've always believed that if there's a dollar to be made online, somebody is trying to do it.

Product Hunt has a lot of guidance on their website about the best way to launch your product, and I decided to follow their advice to maximize my chances of getting users. They have areas in your profile where you can link your various social accounts, and I did post my LinkedIn account. This is how most of the marketers contacted me.

I received five solicitations to buy upvotes, all from people located in India. The location is relevant because a lot of the effectiveness of the schemes they propose relies on time zones.

Product Hunt lists everything just after midnight each day, specifically at 12:01 AM Pacific / 3:01 AM Eastern. It's an American website, so most people there probably start visiting 6-9 hours later (if I had to guess; my impression is people look at this kind of thing during work hours).

By that time, there are a lot of votes, and the ranking of different projects is fairly set for the day, with the highest-voted staying at the top throughout the day and getting disproportionate visibility. This is what the marketers are exploiting.

By the way, I wanna add: I don't particularly care about this. I don't think it's a huge ethical or moral issue; I just find it interesting when a design decision leads to this kind of thing.

What Do They Charge?

I replied to everyone who contacted me and asked for their rates and what they could provide. I also told them I was writing a blog post about this, which might explain why I only received three replies.

R's Track Record

There were 18 folders inside "Upvotes Proof" for projects listed in 2026, so I went through all of them to figure out how successful they were and what level they were operating at.

The majority of the campaigns had them adding about 60 upvotes to a product launch. That makes me question their ability to deliver the 100-300 upvotes in the pricing list, but they did have a couple of folders from 2025 with 250+ screenshots per project.

* "Current Votes" is the vote count showing on Product Hunt today. In several cases this is significantly lower than the paid votes that were delivered, suggesting PH is detecting and removing some of the paid accounts after the fact.

You can see hints of this in the chart: in several cases, the folder had 40-50 screenshots (again, almost certainly real) of people upvoting a project, but a month or two later the project only had 10 votes showing on Product Hunt.

I'm not naming any of the projects that used these marketing services, because I don't want to put anyone on blast for trying to promote a project they made. Some of the projects were half-baked to begin with, in my opinion, and I honestly feel a little bad for them because I find it hard to believe they got a positive ROI from these upvotes.

There were also a couple of bigger companies that I had heard of, including a vibe coding platform with 9 figures of funding, and I'd imagine they're just spraying marketing money wherever.

So How Much Would It Cost to Hit #1?

I looked at how many upvotes it required to hit #1 in 2026, and in the sample I took, it was about 480 on average. If you assume that buying 500 upvotes probably gets you the top spot, then it looks like maybe $750 based on the prices I was quoted.

I don't know if that's an accurate number, though, because getting a few hundred upvotes early after voting starts could probably lock in enough visibility to get organic votes later on.