Where to advertise a startup when you only have $200

Every "how to market your startup" list assumes a budget that starts at a thousand dollars a month. This one assumes two hundred, once, and that you would like to know what happens to it. Fifteen places to advertise a startup with $200 are below: five that cost nothing, six that fit inside the budget, and four where $200 is not enough to learn anything at all.

Prices are the published rates or the documented averages as of August 2026. Where a figure comes from a benchmark rather than a rate card, the source is named. Check them before you spend — they move, and a list like this rots.

The honest summary first

If you have proven search demand, buy Google clicks. Nothing else on this list puts you in front of somebody who has already typed what you sell. At the 2026 all-industry average of $5.42 a click (WordStream), $200 buys you 36 clicks and — at the 8.18% average landing page conversion rate — about three conversions, most of which are form fills rather than customers. Whether 36 clicks can tell you anything is a separate question, taken seriously in what $200 buys you on Google Ads. The ad budget calculator runs the same arithmetic at any spend level.

If you do not, spend nothing until you have tried the free options. There are five below, and between them they will tell you more about whether anyone wants your product than $200 of paid traffic will.

The full list

Free, and worth doing first

1. Product Hunt — $0. One launch day, and the tail is short. Realistically a few hundred visits and a handful of signups for most launches, far more for a small number. It works once; a second launch of the same product rarely lands. Save it until the page converts.

2. Indie Hackers, r/SaaS, r/startups — $0. Communities, not channels. A post that reads like an advertisement gets removed; one that shares something specific you learned gets read. Slow, and the only cost is being genuinely useful first.

3. Directory listings — $0 for most. BetaList, SaaSHub, AlternativeTo, Uneed, Startup Stash. Individually worth very little traffic. Collectively they are the backlinks that make everything else on this list work better, and they are what AI answer engines quote when somebody asks for alternatives to a competitor. An evening's work, once. The full list is in free advertising for startups.

4. Hacker News Show HN — $0. High variance. A front page is thousands of visits in an afternoon; the median post gets almost nothing. Read the Show HN rules first, because the format is specific and posts that ignore it get flagged. Free to try, so the expected value is fine.

5. BidSurvivor — $0 for an empty slot. Ours, so treat the rest of this entry with suspicion: two twelve-hour slots a day, the first brand into an empty one pays nothing, and every brand's click-through count is public before you bid. Every visitor also starts with $100 of house credit without signing up for anything, so a bid on a held slot need not cost you money either. It is a small board and the numbers on the front page say so. Use it to find out whether twelve hours of a page sends you anybody, for nothing.

Paid, under $200

6. Google Ads — ~$5.42 a click. About 36 clicks. The only channel here with real purchase intent behind it, and the only one where $200 buys a statistically meaningless sample. Two weeks of learning phase eats most of a small budget before the campaign knows anything.

7. Reddit Ads — roughly $0.75–$2 CPC depending on subreddit. $200 buys 100–250 clicks. Cheaper than Google and far less intent; works when you can name the exact subreddit your buyer lives in, and badly when you cannot. More on picking one in Reddit ads for startups.

8. Newsletter sponsorship (small) — $100–$500 a send. A niche newsletter with 5,000 engaged readers routinely beats a general one with 50,000. The whole return depends on picking correctly, and you get one shot per send.

9. X / Twitter Ads — $0.26–$1.50 CPC. Cheap clicks, weak conversion for most B2B software. Better used to amplify a post that is already performing organically than to run cold.

10. Sponsoring a small podcast — $18–$50 CPM. $200 buys a read on a show with a few thousand listeners. Almost impossible to attribute, which is either fine or disqualifying depending on how you think.

11. Carbon Ads / EthicalAds — CPM-based, developer audiences. Clean, non-intrusive, and genuinely well targeted if you sell to developers. $200 goes quickly; the cheaper substitutes are compared in Carbon Ads alternatives.

Where $200 is not enough to learn anything

12. LinkedIn Ads — $8–$12 a click. $200 is roughly 20 clicks. Excellent B2B targeting attached to a price that makes a small test meaningless.

13. Facebook / Instagram Ads — $1–$3 CPC, but the algorithm needs volume to optimise. A $200 budget never leaves the learning phase, and you will conclude the channel does not work when what you actually measured was noise.

14. Display / programmatic networks — technically affordable, and the reason your $200 disappears is that a meaningful share of programmatic traffic is not human. Juniper Research puts advertising spend lost to fraud at $68 billion a year.

15. "Growth hacking" agencies — $200 does not buy an agency. It buys an onboarding call.

What I would actually do with $200

Nothing, for the first week. Do items 1–5, which cost nothing, and see whether anybody wants the thing.

Then spend the whole $200 on one channel rather than $40 on five. Five underpowered tests produce five ambiguous results; one test with a real sample produces an answer. If you have search demand, that channel is Google. If you do not, it is whichever community your buyer already reads.

The trap is spreading it thin so that every result is explicable and none is conclusive. That feels like diligence and is actually the most expensive thing on this page.

Judging the result without fooling yourself

Before you spend, write down the number that would make you continue. Not "some signups" — a number, and a definition of what counts. Then hold to it, because the temptation afterwards is to redefine success as whatever happened.

Two failure modes eat most small budgets. The first is measuring opens, impressions or "reach" rather than people who arrived on your page and did something — the difference is laid out in vanity metrics vs real clicks. The second is drawing a conclusion from a sample too small to have one: 36 clicks and one signup is indistinguishable from 36 clicks and zero, statistically, and both are compatible with a good product and a bad landing page.

If the budget is even smaller than this, the arithmetic changes rather than disappearing — what a $50 advertising budget can and cannot do covers that end, and how much it costs to advertise a startup covers the range above it.

The bias in this piece

I run BidSurvivor, which is number 5. It is free to try and I have put it fifth rather than first because for most products it is not the highest-return option on this list — the free community routes are, and Google is if you have intent to buy. A list where the author's own product wins every row is not a list, it is an advertisement with a table in it.