Four in five launches still register a domain
Across two years and sevenfold growth in launch volume, the share of Product Hunt launches with a domain of their own never left the band between 78.9% and 82.5%. Free hosting did not dent it.
Permutica finds domain names nobody has registered yet. Search domains
Edited and reviewed by the Permutica editor before publishing. How we work
Every Product Hunt launch from 1 September 2024 to 1 September 2026: 16,861 products, each one's web address recovered from its own /products page, of which 14,354 resolved. Each address was sorted by its registrable host into an app-store listing, a hosting platform's subdomain, a link shortener, or a domain of the launch's own. The platform and store lists are maintained by hand rather than inferred from how often a host repeats, because a company shipping many products looks identical to a platform by frequency alone. Every count comes from scripts/research/product-hunt/analyse-domains.ts over the published dataset.
Free hosting got very good over the last two years. Vercel, Netlify, Lovable and a dozen others will give anyone a working public URL in a minute, at no cost, with no card. The obvious prediction is that fewer founders would bother registering a domain.
We checked. Across 14,354 Product Hunt launches with a working web address, the share that registered a domain of their own was 79.9% in the first quarter measured and 80.3% in the last, and it never left the band between 78.9% and 82.5% in between.
What the other fifth is doing
The 2,932 launches without a domain of their own split into two groups that behave differently and are worth keeping apart.
An app-store listing means the product may have no web address of its own at all. apps.apple.com/us/app/kitchen-pantry-tracker is where the product lives, and the store page is doing all the work a homepage would do.
A platform subdomain means the product does have an address and never registered anything. nextrelations.vercel.app is a real site at a real name. The name is simply rented from Vercel rather than owned.
One caveat belongs here rather than at the end, because it limits the app-store figure badly. A mobile app with a perfectly good website is counted here by whichever address Product Hunt holds, and for a mobile app that is usually the store. Some unknown share of those 1,849 launches do own a domain and simply did not lead with it. So 12.9% is a ceiling on the truly domainless mobile products, not a measurement of them, and the honest floor for launches with no domain anywhere is the 7.3% on platform subdomains.
Apple accounts for 588 of the store listings and Google 539, the latter split between Play and the Chrome Web Store. GitHub contributes 314, which are mostly open-source tools where the repository is the product. Gumroad adds 175, which are mostly paid templates and downloads.
On the platform side, Vercel is dominant with 477, then Netlify at 151, GitHub Pages at 128 and Lovable at 84.
The line that did not move
| Quarter | Launches | Own domain | Platform | App store |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 Q3 | 284 | 79.9% | 3.2% | 16.5% |
| 2024 Q4 | 521 | 82.5% | 4.6% | 12.3% |
| 2025 Q1 | 879 | 79.9% | 5.6% | 14.6% |
| 2025 Q2 | 1,222 | 78.9% | 6.2% | 14.4% |
| 2025 Q3 | 1,198 | 79.0% | 8.0% | 12.6% |
| 2025 Q4 | 1,625 | 79.3% | 6.8% | 13.5% |
| 2026 Q1 | 2,610 | 78.9% | 8.3% | 12.6% |
| 2026 Q2 | 3,983 | 79.7% | 7.8% | 12.2% |
| 2026 Q3 | 2,032 | 80.3% | 7.4% | 12.2% |
Across two years the share registering a domain begins at 79.9% and ends at 80.3%. In the same period the number of launches per quarter went from 284 to nearly 4,000.
That stability is the finding, because plenty happened during it that should have disturbed it. Hosting platforms made shipping without a domain trivially easy and free. AI app builders arrived and put a working deployed URL in the hands of people who had written no code. Lovable alone accounts for 84 launches here, all of them on lovable.app, and did not exist in this dataset's first quarter.
Platform subdomains did grow, from 3.2% to about 8%. They roughly doubled, then stopped. From the third quarter of 2025 onward the figure moves between 6.8% and 8.3% with no direction in it. Whatever population is content to launch on a rented name appears to have been reached.
Reading it honestly
Product Hunt selects for a particular kind of launch, and that matters more here than in most of our research. Posting a product on Product Hunt is an act of promotion, and someone willing to do it has already decided the product is worth showing to strangers. The genuinely casual end of building, the weekend project shared in a Discord and nowhere else, is underrepresented by construction.
So read 79.6% as the domain-registering rate among products whose makers thought them worth launching, not among everything built. The first number is the one that describes intent.
The launches come from the public Product Hunt API. The full method, the decisions that could have gone another way, and the dataset as a CSV are on how we measured this.
What it suggests
The free subdomain turned out to be a complement rather than a substitute. It absorbed a class of product that would otherwise have launched with nothing at all, and it stopped there.
For the four in five who do register, the decision looks less like a cost question than a signal one. A .vercel.app address says the thing was built quickly and may not be permanent, which is accurate for a large share of what appears on Product Hunt and is exactly what a founder building something they intend to keep does not want said.
Common questions
- Do you need a domain to launch a product?
- Four out of five do. Across 14,354 Product Hunt launches with a resolvable address, 79.6% registered a domain, 12.9% linked to an app-store listing, 7.3% used a hosting platform's subdomain such as vercel.app, and 0.3% used a shortened link. That 79.6% has stayed between 78.9% and 82.5% every quarter for two years.
- Is it fine to launch on a vercel.app or netlify.app subdomain?
- 1,044 launches did, and the share doing so roughly doubled between late 2024 and late 2025 before flattening near 8%. It is a real and stable choice rather than a fringe one. It also stopped growing, which suggests it found its natural ceiling rather than continuing to displace domains.
- Which platforms do domainless launches use?
- Among hosting subdomains, vercel.app leads with 477, then netlify.app with 151, github.io with 128 and lovable.app with 84. Among app-store listings, Apple accounts for 588, Google 539 across Play and the Chrome Web Store, GitHub 314 and Gumroad 175.
- Did no-code and AI app builders reduce domain registration?
- Not measurably, in this population. Launch volume grew roughly sevenfold across the two years and the domain-registering share ended where it started, at about 80%. Builder platforms added a visible class of domainless products without changing the overall proportion.
Run it yourself
The construction this piece measures: Brandable Nouns + Adjectives on ..com. Nothing runs until you click search.