Frequently asked questions

Products are ranked by their PBS (Points-Based Score) — a blend of the product's community signals: recent upvotes (newer ones count for more), saves, follows, ratings and real click-throughs, and the reputation the community has invested in it. Every signal is bounded so no single one can dominate, and a product's score gently fades as it goes dormant — keeping the leaderboard fresh. You can filter by Today, This Week, This Month, or All Time. The more genuine engagement you collect, the higher you climb.

Reputation points reward community engagement — you earn them by participating, not by receiving. Upvoting, commenting, reviewing, following, and favoriting other products each earn a point, capped per day to keep things fair. Your balance shows on your creator profile and it is yours to spend: investing reputation in a product raises that product's ranking score, your own products included. Earning reputation doesn't lift your rank by itself — investing it is what does.

Submitting is free. Log in, click "Submit" in the navigation, and paste your website URL — our AI prefill extracts your product name, tagline, description, and screenshots automatically. Review the details, add categories and pricing, and submit. After a quick publishing check your product goes live on the leaderboard. The whole process takes under 5 minutes and costs nothing.

Every logged-in user gets one vote per product, with a daily budget of 10 votes that resets every day — this prevents gaming and keeps the leaderboard fair. Each upvote lifts the product's PBS and earns you (the voter) a reputation point, capped daily. You cannot vote for your own product.

Yes — AppBoard is free. Creating an account, submitting a product, launching, voting and investing reputation cost nothing, and there is no free trial that expires. Rank itself is never for sale — the score has no paid input, so a free listing competes on the leaderboard on equal terms. The one paid option, promoted placement, buys labelled visibility in dedicated rows and no score at all.

Yes. Once submitted, your product stays on AppBoard indefinitely and always appears in the All Time leaderboard. The Today and This Week views are time-windowed — they reflect your launch date, not an expiry. Your listing is never removed unless it violates our guidelines.

A product's PBS is specific to that product — a blend of its recent upvotes, saves, follows, ratings and click-throughs, plus the reputation invested in it. A user's reputation is a balance they earned by engaging with the community (upvoting, commenting, reviewing, following, favoriting). The two meet when you spend: invested points are a real term in that product's PBS, and they decay like upvotes, so a boost has to be kept up rather than bought once. A large balance on its own does nothing for your products until you invest it.

AppBoard is built around reputation you earn and then spend on the launches you believe in, not just around the product, and it is free to launch on. There's no invite-only hunter system, no algorithm hiding your launch, and no "golden kitty" gatekeeping. If you ship, you get a fair shot. We also weight recency so every day is a clean slate for new launches.

Yes. Promoted products appear in dedicated sections on the home page and leaderboard, clearly labelled as sponsored. Promotion is extra visibility alongside your organic ranking — it is not one of the signals in the PBS, so it cannot move you up the leaderboard. Only community engagement and invested reputation do that. You can start a promotion yourself anytime from your product's analytics page; checkout is self-serve and takes a minute.

The first few hours matter most — votes collected early carry the highest recency weight. Share your AppBoard listing on social media, in your communities, and with your existing users. Engaging with comments on your product page also signals activity and keeps your listing prominent throughout the day.