Terms

What this is

Roasty shows new startup launches and lets strangers react to them: a roast 🔥 or a toast 🥂, one vote per startup per person. The startups come from public launch pages on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers and Y Combinator, and from founders who submit their own.

A score here is a popularity reading, not a judgement of a business. It is the opinion of whoever happened to swipe, it is not advice, and neither a roast nor a toast is an endorsement by us.

Voting

One vote per startup per person. Do not try to stuff the ballot — scripting votes, or voting from a pile of browsers to move a score, gets those votes removed and the source blocked. We count network fingerprints precisely so that this is noticeable.

Accounts and claiming

An account is an email address we have verified, through a link we sent or through Google. Claiming a startup means proving it is yours: from the address already on file, from an address on the company's own domain, or by publishing a token we give you on that domain.

Do not claim something that is not yours. Claiming a card does not change its votes, hide them, or take it out of the deck.

What you can buy

• Days in the deck — 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, at the front of it.
• A slot in tomorrow's daily deck — one of the 10 cards everyone plays first, for €1.99.
• A tile beside the deck — one of 6 spots, €1.99 for 24 hours.
• A seat in a roaster's round — a named person writes a roast or a toast about your launch and publishes it on your card, and the seat also puts you in the deck for 7 days. The roaster sets the price.

The first three buy placement, not outcome. Paying puts your card in front of more people; it does not buy a better score, and we will not touch the votes. Time starts when the payment clears. Payments are handled by Stripe.

A seat is the one thing that buys words rather than placement, so it has its own rule: it buys an opinion, not a good one. The roaster decides whether it is a roast or a toast and we do not write it, edit it or soften it. We hold the money until they publish it. If they have not published within 9 days of the round closing, we refund you automatically — you do not have to ask us — and the roaster is paid nothing for that seat. What they write does not move your roast and toast counts either: those stay what strangers thought. Roasters keep 70% of the seats they deliver.

If something goes wrong — the placement did not run, or it ran wrong — email us and we will put it right or refund it. Nothing here takes away rights you have under consumer law where you live.

What you can put on the page

If you buy a tile or submit a startup, what you write has to be yours to publish and honest about what it is.

Nothing illegal, no adult content, no malware, no coin pumps or trading signals, no fake download or “you have won” buttons, and nothing impersonating someone else. We take down anything in that direction without warning and keep the money.

Taking things down

We can remove any card, tile or account, at any time, for any reason we think is good enough. If your startup is in the deck and you would rather it was not, email us from your company domain and it is gone within a day, no questions asked.

The boring part

Roasty is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be up, correct, or free of bugs, and we are not liable for what you lose by relying on it. Where the law lets us limit what we owe you, our liability is capped at what you have actually paid us in the last twelve months.

We may change these terms. Material changes get a new date at the top; carrying on using the site is how you accept them.