Every day, after launching, makers are contacted on LinkedIn and X by people offering to sell votes. As the Product Hunt team, we are very much aware of this and really hate it. We have systems in place to neutralize this type of gaming. Every vote counts for a different number of points on Product Hunt. A couple examples:

• An account with a recently created gmail address and no history of quality contributions on Product Hunt: this vote will count for 0 points. Yes, this might be a well intentioned user, but we take a conservative approach to protect the community. If the account has a company email or applies for verification on Product Hunt, that's a different story.

• An account with a company email address linked to a legitimate LinkedIn account with a history of meaningful contributions on Product Hunt: this vote carries significant weight.

A couple questions for the community:

• Are there specific accounts on Product Hunt that you suspect participate in vote selling? You can reply here or email report@producthunt.co

• What would you want to see us do differently here?

We re all builders here, which usually means at some point we looked at something clunky, slow, or frustrating and thought, there has to be a better way. Most products don t start with a grand vision; they start with irritation, curiosity, or firsthand pain.

I d love to learn more about how others here have navigated that journey:

How did you uncover the problem you decided to work on?
What signals told you this problem was worth solving?
How did you validate (if at all) whether people would actually pay for a solution?
Has your product stayed true to the original problem, or did it evolve into something different?
What surprised you the most along the way?

Hi fellow ProductHunters,
My name is Hamid, live in the Netherlands and have been a developer for roughly 25 years already.
I used to work a lot on webshops and magento in particular. Besides my freelance work, i have started a lot projects in the past and now i am fully focussed on www.dainostore.com. DainoStore is basically an ecommerce platfornm which contains a lot of best practices and no-code features, but also ai for product image optimization, translations, shop management and ai plugin creation. I would say take a look and you can also contact me for a producttour or just to talk ecommerce in general.
Thanks guys and happy coding!

Hey everyone,

I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market.
That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.

In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.

For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools: