How to share your startup on r/programming

TL;DR

r/programming is one of Reddit's largest developer communities, with about 6.9 million members (October 2026), and it accepts link posts only. Rule 5 bans product promotion and "I made this" demo posts, so you cannot post your startup there. The moderators welcome technical write-ups about hard engineering problems, written by a human, which suits technical founders with something real to teach.

How we checked: we read these rules through public subreddit trackers in October 2026. Read the sidebar and the pinned posts before you post, since moderators update the rules.

What is r/programming?

r/programming is a free subreddit about computer programming. Members share links to articles, papers, talks and code, then discuss them in the comments. It grew by about 144,000 members over the past year, according to the GummySearch tracker.

The subreddit has 14 rules, and five of them decide whether a founder's post survives:

1. No LLM-written content: "If you don't want to write it, we don't want to read it." This covers using AI to translate or summarise, too.
2. No product promotion or "I made this" demos (rule 5): the subreddit is not the place to post a project for feedback or help. Technical write-ups on what makes a project challenging or educational are "allowed and encouraged", but a GitHub link or feature list gets removed. The rule ends: "We don't care what you built, we care how you build it."
3. No content aggregators (rule 6): no newsletters or listicles.
4. No blogspam (rule 11): no posts that only link to the original source.
5. No extreme beginner content (rule 12): "what is a for loop" tutorials get removed.

Rules 2 and 4 add that AI-related posts must be deeply technical and follow the subreddit's AI policy.

Who should post on r/programming?

Good fit:

• Technical founders and CTOs who solved a hard problem while building their product and can explain it in depth.
• Developer tool startups with an engineering blog that publishes original research, benchmarks or post-mortems.

Skip it:

• Anyone who wants to announce a launch, collect signups or ask for feedback on a product. Rule 5 removes these posts.
• Founders who plan to write with ChatGPT or another LLM. Rule 1 bans it.
• Anyone after a backlink: Reddit links carry nofollow, and the DA 91 belongs to reddit.com.

How much does r/programming cost?

Posting is free. The subreddit sells no featured slots.

How do you share your startup on r/programming?

1. Open r/programming, join, and read the sidebar rules and the pinned posts first. The Threadfox tracker notes that AutoModerator can apply account age or karma limits that the rules do not publish.
2. Write an original article on your own blog about one engineering problem: what broke, what you measured, what you tried and the code that fixed it. Your product appears as context, never as the point.
3. Submit it as a link post with a plain, descriptive title, then stay in the comments to answer technical questions.

Tips to get more out of r/programming

• Title the post after the problem, such as "How we cut our Postgres bill by 60% by moving cold rows to S3". A title naming your product reads as an ad.
• Show numbers and code: benchmarks, graphs and failed attempts give readers something to discuss.
• Write it yourself. Rule 1 gives moderators discretion in unclear cases, so a personal voice with your own mistakes protects the post.
• Keep a link to your product in the article footer only. Readers who liked the engineering will find it.

Our verdict

r/programming is closed to startup promotion, and the rules say so plainly. For a technical founder who can write a strong engineering article, it is one of the biggest developer audiences on the internet, and a single good post brings readers who care how your product works.

More options: see all subreddits for founders. Planning the launch around this listing? The Fe/male Switch startup game walks women founders from idea to first customers.