Everything you need to know about LaunchList

LaunchList is pre-launch waitlist software built for startup founders. It combines a hosted launch page and signup forms you can embed on your own site, a built-in referral program with queue positions and rewards, spam protection, email to your list, analytics and no-code integrations, all running on one set of data.

There is a Free plan for 100 contacts, and paid plans start at $9 a month. Start free, or see the feature list and the interactive demo.

Yes.

LaunchList has a Free plan for 100 contacts with no card needed. It includes the page editor, forms, referrals, spam protection and analytics. Paid plans start at $9 a month, on the Collect plan. Start free or compare plans on the pricing page.

No. You can run a waitlist on LaunchList with no website at all. Every project ships with a free hosted waitlist page at your-slug.launchlist.page, live and shareable on every plan.

The hosted page is fully customizable in the dashboard (logo, colors, hero copy, sections like benefits and questions, and your referral mechanics) without writing a single line of code. See hosted page vs embedded widget if you are deciding which to use.

LaunchList is a subscription priced by list size: the number of contacts you hold.

• The Free plan: free for 100 contacts, with no card needed and no time limit.
• Paid plans: from $9 a month on the Collect plan, each sold at a size up to 100,000 contacts.
• Enterprise: more than 100,000 contacts. Talk to us.

Every paid plan is billed monthly or yearly, and yearly is 2 months free. There is no charge for extra contacts: contacts past your size are saved but hidden until you move up a size, never deleted. Extra campaign emails are $3 per 1,000 emails, shown to you and approved before you send. These are beta prices and may change for new subscriptions after beta, with notice first. Every price at every size: pricing. Start free.

LaunchList is a subscription, billed monthly or yearly (yearly is 2 months free). There is no one-time or lifetime plan.

The Free plan is free for 100 contacts, with no time limit. Paid plans are priced by list size and start at $9 a month on the Collect plan. You can change plan or size, or cancel, any time from Workspace → Billing. See pricing or start free.

Monthly plans are not refunded. A yearly payment, first purchase or renewal, is refunded in full if you cancel within 14 days of paying, while fewer than 100 contacts have been added and no campaign emails have been sent since that payment.

To cancel, open Workspace → Billing and choose Cancel plan. Your plan then runs to the end of the period you paid for and does not renew, and your data stays exportable. If something went wrong on our side, such as a duplicate charge, write to support.

Every signup gets a unique referral link the moment they join your waitlist. When a friend signs up through that link, the referrer's queue position improves and their referral count goes up.

The result is a built-in viral loop: each new signup is also a potential acquisition channel. The mechanic is opt-in for users (they decide to share) but rewarded automatically (the system tracks attribution and updates the leaderboard in real time). For the deeper theory, read The viral loop guide and the Dropbox referral case study.

Yes, that is the headline mechanic. Each successful referral earns the referrer points, and the line is ordered by points, so every referral moves them ahead of people with fewer. You choose how many points a referral is worth under Audience → Referrals & rewards, and on the Collect plan, the Launch plan and the Grow plan you can add other actions that give points, such as following you on X.

Each person's status page shows their place in line and their referral link, so sharing the link to socials, friends, or a Slack group costs the user nothing and visibly rewards them. This is the engine behind the famous Dropbox 3,900% referral growth, and it works for any pre-launch product, not just consumer apps.

LaunchList works on every modern website builder, CMS, and JavaScript framework. Out-of-the-box guides exist for:

• Website builders: Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Carrd, Framer, Typedream, Weebly, Cargo, Instapage
• CMS: WordPress
• No-code apps: Bubble
• JavaScript frameworks: React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Astro
• Plain HTML: HTML guide

If your platform allows you to insert a <script> tag and a <div> block, LaunchList works. See the full integration page or browse all guides in the docs.

LaunchList is built to support GDPR-compliant waitlists for EU founders and EU-resident signups, but it holds no certification and has not been audited, so it is not a compliance credential on its own. You are the data controller for your audience; we are your processor. The platform supports:

• Lawful basis: everyone who joins is recorded as agreeing to hear from you, with the date, and you can add a consent checkbox to any form.
• Proof of address: Ask people to verify their email is on by default for waitlist forms.
• Right to access: every contact's record shows what is held about them, and you can export it as CSV.
• Right to erasure: erase a signup's personal data from the dashboard, which is distinct from removing them.
• Storage limitation: an optional retention clock that erases signups after 180 days, or 1, 2 or 3 years.
• Data minimization: only the fields you collect are stored.

What does not exist yet: a published Data Processing Agreement (DPA) (ours is a draft), EU-only data residency, and an EU or UK representative. Compliance is shared responsibility: you control what you collect, how you display the consent prompt, and what your privacy policy says. Read our GDPR page, privacy policy and terms.

Yes. Open Audience → Signups and press Export to download your list as a CSV. You choose the columns, among them: identity and email, name, subscription and verification, queue position, referral link and count, who referred them, trust, source and UTM parameters, location, device, signup date, and custom field answers. The export follows whatever you are looking at, so filter first to export just that subset. It runs in the background and arrives as a download link.

Exports are available on every plan, including Free, and there is no cap on how often you can run them. Many founders run a weekly export as a backup even when they have no immediate need. You can also stream signups in real time via webhook or, on the Launch plan and the Grow plan, Zapier.

LaunchList runs a layered spam defense on every signup, so the list you launch with is real people:

• Rate limiting: caps signups per IP address and per device.
• Disposable address detection: flags throwaway mailboxes against a list refreshed weekly.
• Device clustering: spots many signups coming from one device, which is how referral farming shows up.
• Honeypot and time trap: a hidden field people never fill in, and a check for forms submitted faster than a person could type.
• Held for review: the signals add up to a score, and a signup past the line waits for you in Audience → Signups instead of joining your list. You set how eager this is under Spam protection in Project settings → Privacy & spam.
• Captcha: optional, with your own Cloudflare Turnstile, reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha keys.
• Email verification: Ask people to verify their email is on by default for waitlist forms, so a fake signup costs a working mailbox.

For deeper guidance, read Keeping fake signups out.

Start the waitlist the day you can describe the product in one sentence. You do not need a working build, a logo, or a domain, only a positioning statement clear enough that a stranger reads the page and thinks "I want this when it ships."

For most launches, 8 to 16 weeks of pre-launch capture is the sweet spot. Less than 4 weeks rarely lets the referral loop compound. More than 6 months drains the audience's enthusiasm before launch day. The earlier you start, the more time the viral loop has to compound.

Background reading: What is a pre-launch waitlist?.