Changelog

The Star Hopper leaderboard only ever finalised the month right before the current one. If nobody opened the board during that window, the month was skipped and its champion never got the star colour we promise on the game page. The board now walks back through every uncrowned month and crowns them all, so any champion the old behaviour missed gets their prize on the next visit.

August was the first full month with both games running, and we published the results in the Flight Log. ManagedHorizons won Deep Space Run with 1,278 km and TicketsData won Star Hopper with 38,114 points. The Run winner gets the monthly winner badge for their listing. The Star Hopper champion gets to colour their star in the galaxy, which is the only way a star stops being gold.

We audited the site on September 3 and found two bugs in how we handled listings. One could let an existing listing be re-saved by someone who did not own it, and one could let a listing lookup match the wrong rows. Both are fixed. Relaunching a listing you own now returns your star and emails you a sign-in link instead of overwriting anything. Test flights are also no longer shown in the fleet, the sitemap or the galaxy.

The decorative backdrop of the galaxy is now drawn on a canvas instead of thousands of SVG nodes, and the launched stars come from the server with the page. The HTML dropped from 486 KB to about 230 KB and the page went from 13,500 DOM nodes to under 1,000. On phones the map now fits all galaxies to the screen on load, the zoom buttons show on every width, and stars have larger touch targets and can be reached from the keyboard. The landing cinematic also gained a Skip intro pill, and returning in the same session takes you straight to the launch form.

We launched our own product on eight platforms and measured what each one sent in the first weeks, then wrote it up as Best SaaS Launch Platforms in 2026, With Real Numbers. The counts are GA4 referral sessions from one product over one month, so treat them as a floor rather than a benchmark. The second guide, Website Launch Announcement: 12 Templates and Examples, gives you copy-paste templates for email, X, LinkedIn, Product Hunt and more, each with a filled-in example from our own launches and a timing plan.

We added a page for founders weighing BetaList against other places to launch. It covers what BetaList costs and who it suits, how to get listed, and a table of eight alternatives with cost, wait time and backlink type. SaaS Rocket is listed first because it is our site. The other seven rows carry each platform's published cost and wait time.

Every launch cinematic can now be exported as a vertical mp4 ready for YouTube Shorts, TikTok or LinkedIn. When your video is ready we email you, and a Launch video download button appears on your listing page and on each listing in your fleet. The export is a recording of your real replay, with your logo on the hull and the liftoff sound at takeoff.

We switched the launch from $29 to free while we are in early access. No card, no subscription, no renewals. Everything else stays the same: the cinematic, the permanent star, the listing page and the directree.io listing. Free launches have to be claimed by proving you own the product within 48 hours, otherwise the ship fades from the galaxy. We will say so here before that changes.

We cut a short film of a launch, from the countdown to the star landing in the galaxy. It opens in a lightbox from the nav and is embedded on the FAQ page. The launch cinematic itself also gained a liftoff sound effect at the takeoff moment, kept quiet and safe for autoplay.

Star Hopper is our second game for launched products. You drag to aim, sling your rocket around planets and try to deliver it to the star, with one boost per flight and three shots per star. Levels are generated so every one is solvable, and the difficulty ramps for as long as you keep hopping. The monthly champion gets to colour their star in the galaxy from six paper tones. Every other star stays gold.

Your fleet page now has a badge kit: three badge styles, a copy-paste snippet that deep links to your star, and a Check my site button that scans your homepage for it. The outbound link on your listing page is nofollow by default, and once the badge is verified on your site it flips to dofollow. Monthly winners of The Run get their own winner badge served at a per-listing URL. Share links for replays and previews also gained proper preview cards on X, Slack and LinkedIn.

The star map now grows into new galaxies as launches come in, 80 stars per galaxy in launch order, each with its own colour theme. Cmd+K opens a search palette for tools and categories, and the category filter fades everything that does not match. Names show by default with map style decluttering, so more appear as you zoom in. On phones the nav collapses into a menu, search becomes an icon and pinch zooms the map instead of the page. The Run now plays in landscape fullscreen on phones.

Every launch now gets its own listing page at saasrocket.space/tool/your-product with category, screenshots, video, demo and competitors, and ownership is verified by email code, DNS record or meta tag. Owners sign in with a magic link to a fleet dashboard where they can edit their listing and replay their launch. The galaxy at /galaxy shows one real star per launch, nothing decorative. Deep Space Run at /game is a side scrolling survival game with an all time and monthly leaderboard, and the Flight Log is our blog, starting with why we built this.

A launch now costs $29 as a one time payment, up from $19. The price covers the cinematic, the permanent star, your listing page and the directree.io listing. Nothing recurs.