TL;DR: PainHunt analyzes 24 active platforms, chosen so that different kinds of pain show up — emotional reviews, technical bug reports, and open-ended forum venting. This page lists them honestly, including what's currently turned off and why.
Why source diversity matters
Any single platform has a personality. App Store reviews are short and emotional. GitHub issues are precise and technical. Hacker News skews toward developer and founder problems. If you only listen to one, you inherit its blind spots.
PainHunt deliberately mixes source types so a problem that's invisible on one platform still gets caught on another. The goal isn't raw volume — it's coverage of how real demand actually expresses itself.
The 24 active sources
Social & forum signal
- Hacker News (stories + "Who is hiring")
- Lemmy (federated communities)
- Mastodon
- BlueSky
- 15 SaaS-focused Discourse communities
App stores (many countries)
- Apple App Store reviews (19 countries)
- Google Play reviews (19 countries)
Developer & technical communities
- GitHub Issues
- GitHub Discussions
- Stack Exchange network
Discovery & launch platforms
- Product Hunt
- BetaList
- AppSumo
- Chrome Web Store
Writing & long-form
- Medium
- Substack
- Dev.to
- Hashnode (paused — see below)
Jobs & remote work
- RemoteOK
- Remotive
- WeWorkRemotely
Other
- Telegram public channels
- YouTube
- TrustMRR
The exact mix evolves as platforms change their access policies. The number that matters is breadth across types, not any single site.
What's turned off, and why
Being transparent about gaps is part of being trustworthy:
| Source | Status | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Twitter / X | Disabled | Access restrictions made reliable, compliant collection impractical |
| Disabled | Datacenter-IP blocking prevented stable collection despite rate-limit compliance | |
| Hashnode | Paused | The platform moved its API behind a paywall |
These are honest limitations. The same demand signal Reddit carries also shows up across the active sources, so a single disabled platform doesn't blind the dataset — but we'd rather tell you what's missing than imply total coverage.
How the data is handled
- Summaries, not reprints. PainHunt extracts and scores pain points and links back to the public original. It does not republish the author's full text.
- English-facing. The user-facing product presents English content; internal analysis fields are never exposed.
- Continuous, not static. Crawlers run on an ongoing basis, so the database grows daily.
What this means for you
When a pain point ranks highly in PainHunt, it's usually because the same kind of problem appears across multiple source types — an App Store review and a forum thread and a GitHub issue. That cross-platform agreement is a stronger signal than any single loud complaint.
To see it in practice, open the Pain Point Browser and filter by platform, or read how PainHunt works for the scoring details.