Our Ethos
One rule, and the thinking behind it.
No products where AI is the product
The line we draw is simple: if the AI is doing the core thing your product promises, it's an AI product. An AI writing assistant, an AI image generator, an AI chatbot: those are AI products. The human didn't build the capability, they wrapped it.
If you used AI to build something (Cursor to write the code, Claude to draft copy, Midjourney to sketch UI concepts) that's just using tools. Craftspeople have always used the best tools available. What matters is whether the thing you made required your judgment, taste, and effort.
Ask yourself: is the AI doing the work, or are you?
We're not anti-AI
Seriously. We use AI tools every day. We've launched products on Product Hunt. We think Cursor, Claude, and GitHub Copilot are some of the most useful things to happen to software development in years.
There are excellent places to launch AI products: Product Hunt, Hacker News, There's An AI For That, Futurepedia. Those communities are thriving and serve a real purpose. We're not trying to replace them or argue they shouldn't exist.
We're trying to fill a different gap.
The problem we're solving
Product discovery has changed dramatically. The barrier to shipping something that looks like a product is now near zero. That's genuinely exciting, but it also means the feeds are flooded.
For every indie maker who spent six months obsessing over a tool, writing every line themselves, there are dozens of "AI-powered X for Y" submissions that took a weekend to wrap around an API. Both deserve to exist. But they don't deserve the same discovery surface.
Product51 is for people who want to find things where a human had a vision, made thousands of small decisions, and shipped something with a point of view. Hardware, software, games, dev tools: anything where craft is the differentiator.
How we enforce it
Every submission goes through manual review before it's listed. If your product's core value is AI-generated output, it won't be approved. No hard feelings, just the wrong venue.
Community flags help too. If users suspect something slipped through, they can flag it and we'll take another look.
AI products won't be approved. If AI is doing the core thing your product promises, it's not a fit here. Submit it somewhere it'll be celebrated, and it will be.
Bot accounts will be banned. Fake upvotes and AI-generated comments undermine the whole point. We take this seriously and accounts found doing this are removed without warning.