Four questions about who you are trying to reach, what you have already tried and what you can actually spend. You get the rooms those users sit in, what a placement in them costs, and a straight verdict - including the verdict that you should not be buying paid placement at all yet.
Placement and per-result bands are the marketplace rate card for developer & product rooms; the $500 entry campaign and the $50 minimum platform fee are the published pricing floors. The room count spans the band – the low end assumes every placement prices at the top of it. Nothing here is a forecast of results.
Framework, model and AI-tooling servers where builders debug in public. The larger ones already run a sponsor slot.
Buyable – the admin approves and postsML, infra and indie-hacker broadcast channels. Small numbers, one owner, unusually high signal per member.
Buyable – a single owner decidesDev-tool user groups and data or ML collectives. Slower rhythm, but the members are practitioners with a budget line.
Buyable – workspace owner approvesWhere your launch gets judged rather than sold to. There is no admin who will take money to post you.
Not buyable – earn it or skip itStudent builder groups on WhatsApp and Discord, run by a committee that already handles sponsors.
Buyable – sponsorship is routine hereOpen the directory and pick the 2–4 communities whose members are unmistakably developers and AI builders. Fewer, tighter rooms beat a wide net here.
Decide what a signup is worth to you and how many you want. Those two numbers multiply into your ceiling, and you are never billed above it.
Each admin sees the exact copy and the exact price before posting. A refusal is free information: it usually means the room was wrong, not the product.
Clicks and confirmed signups are attributed per community, so the second campaign is aimed rather than guessed.
The same three things a good advisor would ask about before telling you where to spend.
Are your users clustered in rooms somebody runs, or scattered across a market where no single admin reaches enough of them to matter?
Some rooms sell placements as a matter of routine. Others exist precisely to keep vendors out, and no budget changes that.
Every room type has a price below which its admin will not post. If your month cannot clear that floor several times over, you are not running a test.
A signup confirms cleanly. A booked demo does not. What counts as your win changes both the rate and how many of them a click produces.
Deeper on each piece: the community directory · the economics on pricing · run the numbers on the campaign calculator · the channel-by-channel view in distribution for AI startups.
Two answers send you away from Torchly, and the tool states both without softening them.
Campaigns start at $500 and every room has a per-placement floor underneath that. A budget below it buys a single post and no way to tell whether the room or the message was wrong. Content, the rooms you join yourself, and cold outreach cost hours instead, and they have no floor.
The peer circles enterprise buyers sit in are vouched-membership rooms that exist to keep vendors out. The venues that do take money are conference sponsorships priced by the stand. Named accounts and direct outbound are the channel, and no amount of budget converts one into the other.
No. There is no email field and no gate - the diagnosis appears as you answer. It is built to be useful on its own, including in the cases where it tells you not to buy anything from Torchly.
Two clear cases. If your monthly spend is under about £500, the rooms your users are in have a per-placement floor that a sub-minimum budget cannot clear, so you would be buying one post rather than a test - content, communities you join yourself and cold outreach are the honest recommendation. And if you sell to enterprise buyers, community placement is simply the wrong instrument: those rooms exist to keep vendors out, so direct outbound is the channel.
The published marketplace rate card and pricing floors on this site: roughly $250-400 per approved placement in founder, fintech and diaspora professional rooms, $120-200 in developer and product rooms, and $40-80 in student and consumer rooms, plus a per-conversion rate on top. Campaigns start at $500 and the platform fee has a $50 minimum. Nothing in the tool is a forecast of results.
Because the honest read changes. If you have already posted in communities manually, you know the rooms convert and your ceiling is that you get one post per room before you are the spammer. If you have only run ads at a developer audience, the problem was the channel, not the creative. The diagnosis names which it is.
Pick the closest one - the six options map onto the audience bands the rate card actually prices. If none of them fit, that is itself a signal that your users are not concentrated in group chats, and paid community placement will underperform for you.