BetaList

BetaList is a launch directory for pre-launch and recently launched internet startups, operated from Singapore and edited by a small team. Founders pay to submit a product; the team reviews it and, if selected, places it on the site's dated timeline, where early adopters browse for something to try before it breaks out. Browsing is free: a homepage feed that rolls by day, category chips, an email digest of the newest startups, and a Trending Startups block drawn from recent listings. It began in December 2010 as a "coming soon" page built to win press coverage for another product; TechCrunch covered it the next day and it grew into the company, still independent today.

The model differs from most launch platforms in four ways. Submissions are paid only — the FAQ states plainly that there is no free option — yet if a startup is not selected the payment is refunded in full automatically, so the fee buys a decision rather than placement. Selection is editorial rather than algorithmic: the team looks for a clear value proposition, an idea it has not seen before and a well-designed landing page, receives thousands of submissions a month, and gives no individual feedback. Plans differ mainly by how quickly a startup is featured and whether newsletter inclusion is guaranteed. A product is generally featured once, with one exception — something featured pre-launch may be featured again when it launches.

Two constraints are firm. The startup must have its own domain: free hosting subdomains such as vercel.app, netlify.app and herokuapp.com and direct app-store links are refused. A featured listing cannot be edited by its owner afterwards — only the BetaList team can change it, on request — and refunds close once a startup has been featured. Prices are not published: the FAQ says plans appear at the end of the submission form, behind sign-in.

For the founder who pays, the concrete deliverable is a do-follow backlink: the "Visit Site" button does not carry rel="nofollow" but routes through a 301 with ref=betalist attribution, so link equity still reaches the site's own domain; links also carry UTM parameters, making traffic from betalist identifiable in analytics. The Trending Startups ranking is undisclosed beyond engagement such as tweets on a listing's post.

Against the rest of this directory, BetaList is the first listing that is itself a directory of other products rather than a tool used to build or market them. Its nearest neighbours sit in Marketing & Sending — SISTRIX, Ryte, Seobility and Ryze AI measure how visible a product already is — where BetaList is where a product goes to be found first; in Developer Tools the closest entries are a terminal, a code host, an identity server and an agent runner, none a launch channel.

Verified 2026-09-28 from the site's own homepage, FAQ, terms and privacy pages. What it is not: prices are never published publicly, and founders have no self-serve edit path.