gm legends. It’s Sunday.

This week: Amazon uploads a new personality for Alexa, why bots are stealing your clicks, how to choose between paywalls and freemium models, and what people are saying about Claude Code Review. Plus, five of our favorite launches from the past week. 

No paywall here, legend. Enjoy.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

By Nkosilathi Nyoni of Linkb.ee

 

So here's what happened. We were running campaigns, watching our click metrics climb, feeling pretty good about performance. Then we started digging into where those clicks actually came from.

Half of them were bots.

Not simple ones either. Headless browsers mimicking human behavior perfectly. Selenium scripts automating clicks at scale. Click farms using mobile devices. 

Advanced stuff. Rotating IPs, spoofing geolocation, faking mouse movements, generating realistic referrer patterns. Fingerprinting evasion. Timing tricks. Some were so good they looked completely human.

We realized most link tools just count clicks. They don't ask if those clicks are real.

 

You’ve built a product, you’re ready to launch it, and you’re hoping to convince people to pay for it. What do you choose?

1. Hard paywall
2. Freemium

Chris Messina brings some new data to the convo: According to RevenueCat, the former converts 5x better than the latter. But is that the whole story? And which one is better for a Product Hunt launch?

The forum is absolutely popping as people consider the differences between mobile and desktop, where different product categories fall, and whether correlation v. causation might be in play. 

 

Anthropic dropped Claude Code Review this week. It’s a cluster of AI agents that look for bugs in code—code that itself has been developed by AI. Since Anthropic is getting meta, so will we. Let’s do a quick review of early user reviews on Claude Code Review’s launch. 

• Jarmo Tuisk thinks this solves a real problem: “Been building with Claude Code for months now, and the ‘quick skim’ problem is very real. Agents write code fast, but the subtle bugs pile up — especially when one agent changes something another agent built two weeks ago. Multi-agent review makes a lot of sense here. [I’m] curious how it handles context across larger PRs where the full picture only emerges from reading multiple files together.”

• Roop Reddy forecasts carnage: “Seems like Caude killed a lot of code review products from YC. They may have to pivot.”

• Kostia Novofastovskyi finds it all a little too ironic (don’t ya think): “So we have AI writing the code, and now a team of AI agents reviewing the code. Are we humans just here to pay the AWS server bills now?”

 

Amazon unleashed a new personality for its Alexa+ AI assistant on Thursday. Alexa, the sweet yet slightly monotone voice behind such classic lines as “The current weather is 71 degrees” and “Your next meeting is with Cynthia at 1:00,” now comes in an adults-only version.

“Sassy” Alexa curses and makes fun of you, kind of like Jeff Ross at a Comedy Central roast. If you’ve always wanted a sarcastic teenager in your living room, now’s your chance.

But before you go thinking this is like Grok, Amazon wants you to know that it doesn’t do sexual content — and it’s not pulling from X threads, so hate speech shouldn’t pop up.

In case you don’t like being lightly mocked while getting the weather, there are other personalities you can select: 

• Brief, if you want less talking in your life
• Chill, if you want to match the yoga (or stoner) vibe
• Sweet, if you accidentally toggled to Sassy and need to rebuild your confidence