Swapply

Founders who want new users for their app today rely on ads, content, or outreach, all of which take ongoing effort, cost money, and often reach people outside their niche. Cross-promotion within a shared audience is harder to arrange directly because it requires finding compatible apps, negotiating, and manually swapping placements. The text notes small apps in the same niche often have overlapping audiences that convert well, but there is no simple mechanism to tap into that without building and maintaining partnerships one by one.

Swapply lets a founder add one script tag to their app that displays a small customizable card showing other apps in the same category. Every impression a widget gives to another app earns credits (0.9 per view, 9 per click after a 10% network fee), which are then spent to get the member's own app shown in other apps' widgets, creating a self-sustaining ledger instead of an algorithm deciding reach. Matching is restricted to up to 3 shared categories, mutual blocklists keep competitors out, and the widget uses no cookies, storing only a 24-hour hashed visitor ID to prevent duplicate counting. The card comes in four layouts (card, inline, banner, badge), renders in a Shadow DOM at about 4.5KB, and every app submission is human-approved before going live, with an optional convert.js tag for tracking signups.