The Product Hunt Graveyard: 1 in 4 Top Launches (2023–2025) Is Already Dead | RightAIChoice<br>The Product Hunt Graveyard: 1 in 4 top launches from 2023–2025 is already dead<br>Original research by RightAIChoice · every website re-probed, verdicts as of July 18, 2026 · every verdict carries downloadable evidence<br>TL;DR — as of July 18, 2026<br>We visited the live website of 2,291 products that made Product Hunt’s daily leaderboards between January 2023 and April 2025.<br>24.4% are hard-dead — the domain no longer resolves, the page is parked for sale, the security certificate expired, or the homepage returns 404.<br>Another 4.5% now redirect to a different company (acquired or quietly folded). Total gone as independent products: 28.9% .<br>AI tools die at the same rate as everything else — 24.5% vs 24.4%. The AI boom changed what gets built, not what survives.<br>Launch-day success is real protection : finish in your day’s top 5 and the death rate drops to 9%, vs 25.9% for everyone else. But it’s no guarantee — several 600-upvote launches are gone without a trace.<br>Death comes fast: the 2025 cohort is already 20% dead after roughly a year.
24.4%<br>of top launches are dead
2,291<br>products individually probed
9%<br>death rate if you finished top-5
8.9%<br>death rate for open-source products
The headline finding<br>Every day, Product Hunt features roughly twenty new products — the launches that beat hundreds of others to the front page. These are not random side projects; they are the products that won attention, upvotes, and often press coverage on day one.<br>Plenty of curated “graveyard” lists exist — from Killed by AI to CB Insights’ startup post-mortems — but we couldn’t find anyone who had measured the actual rate: of the launches that win attention, how many still exist? So we took 59complete daily leaderboards spread across January 2023 – April 2025, found each product’s real website, and visited all 2,291 of them — as of July 18, 2026.<br>The answer: 24.4% are hard-dead (505 of 2,066products with a definitive verdict). Their domains fail DNS, sit parked with a “buy this domain” page, serve an expired security certificate, or 404 on their own homepage. Add the 4.5% whose domains now forward to some other company, and 28.9% of the products that won Product Hunt’s attention in the last three years no longer exist as independent products.<br>And this is the floor, not the ceiling: 9.8% of products gave ambiguous answers (anti-bot walls, timeouts, vanished app-store listings) and were excluded rather than counted — plus a site that still loads isn’t necessarily a business that still operates.
Death rate by launch year<br>Each row is the cohort of products that hit a sampled daily leaderboard in that year. “Dead” includes parked domains; “absorbed” (redirects to another company) is shown separately.<br>CohortVerifiedDeadAbsorbedDead % (AI only)202379726.5%5.5%23.1%202486024.7%3.7%26.5%202540920%4.4%23.7%<br>Read the curve bottom-up: the 2025 cohort — barely a year old — is already 20% dead. The climb to 26.5% for the 2023 cohort means most products that die do so within their first year or two ; survival past that point flattens the curve. If a tool you rely on launched recently, its riskiest period is right now.<br>Does launch-day hype protect you?<br>Partly — and this is the finding that surprised us most. We expected launch-day placement to be noise. It isn’t:<br>By finishing rank that day<br>Top 5 of the day9% deadRank 6 and below25.9% dead<br>By launch-day upvotes<br>Under 10026.4%100–24923.3%250–4997.1%500+12.9%
A top-5 finish cuts the death rate roughly 2.9× . The likeliest explanation is not magic exposure — it’s selection: products capable of winning a competitive day tend to have real teams and real momentum behind them. But hype is a discount on risk, not insurance — the casualty table below is full of products that had huge launch days and are DNS-dead anyway.<br>AI vs everything else: no difference<br>The prevailing story says AI tools are uniquely ephemeral — thin wrappers doomed to die when the model underneath changes. Our data says otherwise: AI products are dead at 24.5%, non-AI at 24.4% (754 and 1,312 verified products respectively — a statistically meaningless gap).<br>One honest nuance: products carrying Product Hunt’s specific “Artificial Intelligence” topic tag die at 33.7% — above average. But so do comparable non-AI SaaS segments (see the category table below), and our broader AI definition — which also catches AI products filed under Writing, Developer Tools, or Marketing — lands exactly on the overall average. The boom changed what people build; it did not make software businesses die faster than they always have.
The deadliest — and safest — categories<br>Product Hunt topic tags with at least 40 verified products in the sample:<br>Highest death rate<br>Writing42 verified45.2%Hiring40 verified40%Artificial Intelligence86 verified33.7%Knowledge base software45 verified33.3%SaaS67 verified32.8%Developer Tools41 verified29.3%<br>Lowest death rate<br>Open Source45...