Introducing Sky Launch

Sky Launch is live. It is a directory for new products, and it is built in two halves.

The first half is a list. It is free, it is permanent, and it is sorted by nothing more clever than time. The second half is a sky above that list, with clouds in it, and the clouds are the part you pay for. Everything below is an explanation of where the line between those halves sits and why we put it there.

The problem is launch day, not directories

Launching a product on the usual platforms has quietly turned into a job. You pick a date. You warn your friends. You set an alarm for midnight in a timezone you do not live in. Then you spend a full day watching a number move for reasons that have very little to do with what you actually built. At the end of it the traffic decays inside a week, and you are left holding a link that may not pass any authority at all.

The strange part is that the durable half of a launch is the boring half. A page with your name on it. A description a crawler can read. An outbound link search engines are allowed to follow. Something that is still at the same URL in a year. None of that requires a leaderboard, a countdown, or an audience voting in real time.

So Sky Launch keeps the boring half and throws the rest away.

The list is the ground

The home page is every launch, newest first. That is the entire sort. Nothing is weighted, nothing is boosted, and nothing decays. The most recent thing is at the top, and it moves down as other people ship. There is no algorithm deciding what you see because there is nothing left to decide.

Every listing gets its own page, not just a row: your name, tagline, description, icon, category, and an outbound link. The page renders on the server as plain HTML, which matters more than it sounds like it should. A crawler, a badge checker, or an AI assistant reading that page gets your link without executing a single line of JavaScript.

Fourteen categories carry the structure that upvotes would otherwise have to: AI, Dev Tools, SaaS, Design, Productivity, Finance, Media, Marketing, Mobile, Education, No-code, E-commerce, Games, and Other. Each one is its own page. Search goes straight to the matching tool rather than dropping you on a results screen and asking you to try again.

Structure instead of community. You can read the whole site without being asked to participate in anything.

One domain, one listing

A rule worth stating plainly: one domain means one listing. You cannot post the same product four times under slightly different names to occupy the top of the list, and neither can anybody else. It is a unique index on the domain column, not a line in an FAQ, so it holds whether or not anyone is watching.

That single constraint is what keeps a reverse-chronological list readable. Once duplicates are impossible, the list stays a record of what shipped rather than a record of who submitted most aggressively.

The sky is the part you buy

Above the list there is a sky, and in the sky there are clouds. Each cloud is a featured slot: your logo and your name, drifting over the top of the home page where the eye lands before it reaches the first row. It is the only advertising on the site, and it is shaped like weather instead of a banner, because a banner would have to fight the list for attention and a cloud does not.

A cloud is $19 a month. That is the whole price list. Not nineteen for the first one and twenty-nine for the next, not an auction, not a rate that climbs as the board fills. Every cloud costs what every other cloud costs, which means the price on the page is the price, and nobody has to work out whether they are being quoted the good number.

It is a subscription, so the slot is up for exactly as long as you keep paying for it. Cancel and it comes down at the end of the period you have already bought. There is no expiry date to diary, no window quietly lapsing while you are busy, and no email from us trying to talk you into renewing something you did not realise had stopped.

A cloud also includes the listing itself: dofollow, no badge required. You are buying altitude, not access.

Three ways to get a dofollow link

A dofollow link is one search engines are permitted to pass authority through. A nofollow link can still send you visitors, but it counts for much less. Plenty of directories stay vague about which one you are getting. We would rather be specific, so there are exactly three routes:

• Badge, free. Put our badge on your site. We fetch your page and confirm the backlink is really there, and then your listing publishes with a dofollow link. A link back for a link back, checked rather than trusted.
• Dofollow, $9 one time.The same dofollow link with nothing to embed, for people who do not want anyone else's markup in their footer.
• Featured, $19 a month. A cloud on the home page, plus the dofollow listing, no badge needed.

If your badge is not deployed yet, the free path does not dead-end: you can publish immediately with a nofollow link instead, and the listing page says so out loud rather than letting you discover it with a link checker later.

Nothing here expires except the cloud, which lasts precisely as long as you keep paying for it. The listing does not. The page you get on day one is the page that is still there next year, at the same URL.

Submitting takes about a minute

The first screen asks for one thing: your URL. We fetch the page, pull out your name, tagline, description, and icon, and hand it all back to you already filled in. You correct whatever we got wrong, pick a category, pick one of the three routes above, and that is the submission.

We did not want an application form. Most directories ask for a dozen fields before they will look at you, and most of those fields are already sitting in your own meta tags.

What is deliberately missing

No upvotes. No comments. No karma, streaks, badges of honor, or weekly leaderboards. Those mechanics exist to manufacture engagement, and manufactured engagement is exactly what turned launching into a chore. If we ever ship a way for one listing to outrank another through activity, we will have rebuilt the thing we were trying to get away from.

We are also not promising a traffic spike. A directory listing is a foundation, not a growth strategy. What it removes is the dumbest reason a good product fails, which is being invisible to everyone whose job is to find things.

On the sky itself

One paragraph for the part that is purely decorative, since it is the reason this is called Sky Launch and not something with "hunt" or "list" in the name.

The band behind the header is a real sky with a day version and a night version. Clouds drift across three layers at three different speeds, slowly enough that you only notice if you stop and look. After dark there are stars, a moon, and the occasional meteor. The star field is generated from a fixed seed, so it is the same sky on every visit rather than noise that got reshuffled, and the whole thing runs without a line of JavaScript and freezes entirely if your system asks for reduced motion.

It does nothing for your backlink. It is there because a list of links should still be somewhere you do not mind being.

What is next

The near-term list is short and unglamorous: richer category pages, a feed you can subscribe to, and more of the data a maker actually wants about their own listing. If you want something on that list, tell us.

In the meantime the sky is mostly empty and the list is filling up. If you have shipped something, put it up. It takes a minute, and then it is there for good.