I Built an Anti-Hype Launch Platform for Solo Founders. Then Vercel Paused It.
The story of building Hauntboard, hitting 1.2 million reads on the free tier, migrating to Cloudflare for $0, and reaching our first 20 products.
A few months ago, I was talking to an indie friend who had just finished building his first SaaS app.
He had spent three months coding it late at night after his day job. He skipped weekends. He obsessed over every button and database query.
Then launch day came.
He spent 24 straight hours begging people in WhatsApp groups and Discord channels to upvote his project. He posted on Twitter every two hours. By midnight, he won a shiny badge on a popular launch site.
The next morning, his traffic dropped right back to zero.
He had spent three months building software, one day begging for votes, and made exactly $0. Two days later, his product was buried under 500 new submissions, never to be seen again.
That broke my heart. And it made me realize something painful: the way we launch indie products today is broken.
The problem with the 24-hour hype cycle
Most launch platforms are built for teams with big Twitter followings, marketing budgets, and upvote cartels.
If you are a solo maker with 80 followers on X, you have almost no chance. You launch, nobody sees it, and you assume your product is bad.
In reality, your product wasn’t bad. It was just invisible.
I wanted to fix that. So I started building Hauntboard.
The idea was simple:
- 7 days on the board, not 24 hours. Give people a full week to actually browse, click through, and test what you made.
- Human review. A real person looks at every single submission to filter out crypto scams and abandoned templates.
- Permanent dofollow links. When you launch, your page stays indexed permanently so Google and AI search engines (like Perplexity and ChatGPT) can find you for months.
- Public outbound clicks. No fake upvote counters. If Hauntboard sends 4 visitors to your site, the page says 4. If it sends 80, it says 80.
Our motto was simple:
“Don’t be a ghost. Show what you built.”
The morning the site disappeared
I launched the first version of Hauntboard built on Next.js 16 and Convex, hosted on Vercel’s free tier.
Makers started trickling in. People submitted productivity tools, image converters, and developer utilities. Search engine bots started indexing all the launch pages.
Then came November 2.
I opened my phone to check the board, and instead of the homepage, I saw a black screen with four words:
“This page doesn’t exist. 404 DEPLOYMENT_NOT_FOUND.”
I rushed to my computer and logged into Vercel. There was a big red banner across my dashboard:
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“Paused Nov 2 · Fast Origin Transfer · Upgrade to resume service.”
Because of all the pages being indexed and visited, the site had hit 1.2 million ISR reads and exceeded the 10 GB bandwidth limit.
Vercel’s message was polite but firm: pay up or stay offline.
Why I refused to pay
For a funded startup, a $20/month hosting bill is nothing.
But for a solo founder building a free community tool that makes $0 in revenue, that bill is a trap. Once you upgrade, you’re on a treadmill of paying hosting bills for traffic that isn’t paying you back yet.
I made a rule when I started building: never let infrastructure hold your indie project hostage.
Instead of pulling out my credit card, I grabbed a cup of coffee and decided to migrate the entire application to Cloudflare Workers using OpenNext.
It wasn’t easy. Cloudflare’s edge runtime has strict compatibility rules. I had to fix node module shims, rebuild the deployment pipeline, and wire up custom domains.
By the end of the night:
- The site was back online.
- Pages load in milliseconds across Cloudflare’s global edge.
- Monthly hosting cost: $0.
20 launches and counting
Today, Hauntboard reached a milestone I’m quietly proud of: 20 indie products are live on the board.
These aren’t venture-backed apps with $50,000 ad budgets. They are real tools built by solo makers:
- A tool that turns bank statements into spreadsheets locally without uploading private data.
- A free image tool that never stores your files.
- A tool that color-grades videos directly in the browser.
Our total numbers right now are small: 20 launches, 9 verified outbound human visits, and 0 fake upvotes.
In the startup world, people love to brag about vanity metrics: “10,000 signups in 48 hours!” But behind closed doors, half of those numbers are bots, family members, or people swapping favors in group chats.
Small, honest numbers beat inflated vanity badges every single day.
My goal: 50 before December
My goal is to get 50 indie products onto Hauntboard before December.
If you’re a solo developer, designer, or maker building something in your spare time, don’t let your work sit quietly in a private GitHub repository.
Don’t spend 24 hours begging for upvotes in Slack channels just to watch your traffic vanish the next morning.
Come put it on the board. A real person will review it, it will stay on the front page for 7 full days, and every single visit we send you will be counted in public.
You can submit it for free here:
👉 hauntboard.com/submit
Don’t be a ghost. Show what you built.
