I built a message board where you pay to be the homepage
Details
- External ID
- 47411547
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a message board where you pay to be the homepage
- Website domain
- saythat.sh
- Launched
- March 17, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 19
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7312423124231242
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I kept thinking about what would happen if a message board only had one slot. One message, front and center, until someone pays to replace it.That's the entire product. You pay the current message's decayed value plus a penny to take the homepage. Message values drop over time using a gravity-based formula (same concept HN uses for ranking), so a $10 message might only cost a few bucks to replace a day later. Likes slow the decay, dislikes speed it up.The whole thing runs on three mini PCs in my house (k3s cluster, PostgreSQL, Redis Sentinel). Is it overengineered for a message board? Absolutely.I genuinely don't know where this goes. Curious what HN thinks.Archive of past messages: https://saythat.sh/history
Enrichment
- Theme
- payments, billing, and wallet infrastructure
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Marketplace
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- message board where users pay to feature content
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This is a single-record web application with a simple exponential/gravity decay pricing formula, Stripe checkout integration, and a frontend display.
Discussion
14 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Million Dollar Homepage, Traditional social media platforms
Concerns raised: Credit card testing fraud risk with low-priced transactions, Wealthy users given disproportionate voice/influence, High-priced messages killing community interaction, Over-engineered for actual use case
Feature requests: Quarterly donation reports and transparency page, Decay curve tuning to prevent wealthy users dominating
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 48 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #23 of 49 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 104 days after the earliest competitor.
- Billion Dollar Homepage · ph · 2026-09-24 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- base44-pricing.github.io · github · 2026-09-21 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- LAKADE · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app · hn · 2026-02-24 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- The Daily Throne · ph · 2026-09-24 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Was tired of drowning in HN comments, so I built an AI Chief of Staff · hn · 2026-01-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Sunk Cost · hn · 2026-09-15 · 46 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Analyzing 9 years of HN side projects that reached $500/month · hn · 2026-02-08 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.