App Store charts ignore indie apps. I made a chart that doesn’t.
App Store rankings are a black box. If you didn’t already have distribution, you don’t show up.
AppCharts (https://appcharts.app) is a public ranking for indie apps. You submit, people vote, the list is the list. One vote per person per app per week. Votes reset. Nothing is hidden.
The homepage Spotlight is paid, on purpose. If you want the top slot, you buy it. If someone wants it more, they outbid you — 1.5× the current weekly rate, hard cap $1,000/week. You lose the slot. No refund. That’s the whole mechanic.
I built it because I ship iOS apps and I was tired of “discovery” meaning ads or a Product Hunt day. Rankings should be readable. Paid placement should be labeled.
If you have an app, submit it (https://appcharts.app/submit.html). If you don’t, vote for something you actually use.
That’s it. The site is live: appcharts.app (https://appcharts.app)
The transparency is the actual product, not the chart. "Paid placement should be labeled, rankings readable" is a direct shot at Product Hunt's opaque algorithm. Making the buying explicit is more trustworthy than a hidden algorithm pretending to be neutral. Lead with that honesty, PH can't copy it.
But there's a sequencing trap in your own mechanic: the paid Spotlight only has value if the votes underneath are credible, nobody outbids to $1,000/week for a list three people voted on. Votes only come if the list is worth reading. You're solving the chicken-and-egg you built this to fix.
Don't touch Spotlight pricing yet, get one category genuinely active first, then the paid slot has something worth bidding on.
What category are you concentrating votes in to make the list move?
I'm not targeting any specific category. I'm just waiting for the traction to form itself. My point is that if people are voting and are interested in supporting apps they like, then this will form the "credibility cushion" on which the spotlight top will sit.
I'd gently push back, because "wait for traction to form itself" is the exact assumption that stalls marketplaces, and it's worth seeing why before you bet the launch on it. The waiting model assumes voting self-starts. But nobody casts the first vote on a list that isn't yet worth reading, and the list isn't worth reading until it has votes. "People voting for apps they like" requires their app to already be on it AND them to know it's there, passive waiting produces neither. The cushion doesn't form on its own; something has to compress the first layer.
Concentrating one category isn't a marketing tactic, it's the only way to make a first vote mean anything. Five apps in one niche with real votes is a list someone reads and votes on. Two hundred scattered apps with one vote each is noise nobody returns to, even if the total vote count is higher. Density in one corner beats sparseness everywhere, because credibility is local: a voter judges "is this ranking real" by the category they care about, not your sitewide total.
So you're not choosing between "wait" and "target." You're choosing between a cushion that forms in one category you seeded, or one that never forms because the votes stayed too thin to be believable anywhere.
What's the one category where you personally know enough app makers to get the first ten real votes? That's not targeting, that's lighting the pilot.
why is everyone building outbid apps this weekend ? :D
Well because of outbid dot lol hype, maybe? :) In my defense, I'm not building an outbid clone, I'm just trying to take out the lesson and put it in AppCharts The lesson is: "attention has a variable price".
I like the transparency of the voting system, especially the one vote per person per app per week. Have you considered adding separate charts by category or country as the number of apps grows? I think that could make discovery much more useful without turning it into another pay-to-win ranking.
Yes, this is on the roadmap.
This is a much-needed solution for indie developers trying to get noticed. The mainstream app stores can be really tough to break into, so having an alternative platform specifically for community-driven rankings is a great move. Thanks for building this!
Thanks for the nice words and thanks for using it!
Labelling the paid Spotlight instead of hiding it is the right call, but the 1.5x outbid with no refund means the top slot drifts toward whoever has the most cash rather than the best app — which is the App Store problem in miniature. How do you keep the organic list from being read as an extension of the paid one?
The spotlight spending is capped at $1000 right now, so whoever reach that spot stays there until it expires. As for the organic and paid, there's a very clear separation.
The mechanic is clean, but a chart is only worth what the audience reading it is worth, and right now every submitter is also the voter base. A chart read by actual app users can charge for Spotlight forever, a chart where founders vote for each other decays into a leaderboard of who has the biggest following. I'd track voter-to-submitter ratio weekly and treat that as the health metric.
Yes, there are basic anti gaming tools built in (duplicate personas, weekly decay, etc)
The strongest part is the explicit separation between organic ranking and paid visibility. The real question is whether the voting mechanic creates enough recurring participation for the chart to become a discovery destination rather than just another paid placement.
Still observing the behaviors, but so far it looks like it can held.
That makes sense. The behavior over time will probably tell you more than the initial response — especially whether people return to the chart without being prompted.
The one-vote-per-app-per-week rule is a nice touch. It makes the chart feel more like an actual signal than a popularity contest.
Feels like AppCharts could be pulling in a lot more organic traffic than it is right now. Especially this early when you’re still validating where the real demand is.
Have you noticed any surprising searches or people finding it that way yet?
Yeah, I intently wanted to just "take the juice" out of outbid saga, meaning the fact that people can pay variable amounts for premium. It's not a popularity contest, it's a discovery tool with a premium spot.