UpvotePartners
Devtools & cloud infrastructure specialists

Developer and infrastructure marketing, built on Reddit

No engineer adopts a tool because of an ad. We get your product into the threads they actually read before running the install: the ones Google ranks on "best VPS" or "is it worth it" and the ones ChatGPT and Perplexity quote straight back. Peer recommendation, at scale.

🔥 Very limited spots

This is where engineers decide what they will actually run

r/selfhostedr/homelabr/sysadminr/devopsr/webhostingr/kubernetesr/DataHoarderr/VPS
The basics

What does a developer marketing agency actually do?

A developer marketing agency gets a tool in front of the engineers who adopt it, long before a contract exists. Developer adoption runs bottom-up: someone tries the free tier on a Tuesday, and eighteen months later their company is on an annual plan. Nothing in that path goes through a sales deck.

Reddit is where that path starts. r/selfhosted, r/homelab and r/sysadmin run permanent comparisons of hosting providers, storage and monitoring stacks. On infrastructure the alternative sources are almost all affiliate-funded, so Reddit is the only unsponsored opinion in the category. That is why it accounts for 37% of the sources AI engines cite on infrastructure questions across our client base, our highest share of any vertical.

So the job is making sure the conversation about your tool exists, is technically accurate, and is findable at the moment an engineer goes looking. Not shouting over it.

The problem

Your buyer already ran the benchmark

Traditional acquisition

The reality of paid in devtools

  • Engineers running ad blockers, on a channel you are billed for by impression
  • Conference booths and dev newsletter slots with no shelf life past the send date
  • A review profile no engineer has ever opened before choosing a database
  • Affiliate comparison sites owning every "best hosting" and "best VPS" query
  • r/selfhosted and r/sysadmin remove vendor self promotion on sight, and the comments finish the job
  • Absent from AI answers when someone asks what to self-host or which provider to trust
Our system

Reddit + GEO for devtools

The trust channel

  • Placement inside the provider comparison threads Google already ranks, not new threads nobody finds
  • Answers written by people who can actually read your docs and your changelog
  • Competitors named with nuance, because a single-vendor thread reads as bias to a model and to an engineer
  • Your tool quoted in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers when a stack decision comes up
  • Reddit Pro used in the open when the brand wants to speak in its own name
  • Threads that keep working for years, because engines weigh authority over freshness
Our method

Reddit: where infrastructure gets chosen

Your future users are already on Reddit, posting their homelab diagram and asking whether your managed option is worth the premium. We do not create threads here, we get into the ones Google already ranks. We call the method Reddit asset engineering: every thread is an asset that keeps paying out.

Step 1

The prompts an engineer actually types

We start from at least 35 prompts, split roughly 40% selection ("best object storage for backups"), 40% problem-led ("my NAS keeps dropping off the network"), 20% head-to-head, and we drop anything under 30 searches a month. Problem-led prompts matter more here than anywhere else: an engineer searches the error message, not the category.

Step 2

Written like an operator, not like a brochure

Classic SEO teaches that models prefer structured content: headings, bullets, tables. Our tests across thousands of posts say the opposite on Reddit. The more human the format, the more it gets cited. Ten dense lines with a real config, a real number and an honest caveat beat a six-hundred-line article, because a long post costs the model too much to process and costs you credibility with the subreddit.

Step 3

Only threads less than a month old

We never comment on an old thread, even one ranking well on Google. Moderators treat it as self promotion, and more importantly the model's crawler has already read that page and will not come back for your comment. A thread that ranks is not the same thing as a thread that still feeds the engines. This one rule changes where the effort goes.

Step 4

Cited in enough places to stop being noise

A tool named in one source gets treated as noise. Named across four or five independent ones, it becomes a recommendation. That threshold is why this is a volume game rather than a precision game, and it is measured by what an engineer sees when they ask an AI which provider to trust.

What the first six months actually look like

Most agencies answer "three to six months" and stop there. Here is what happens inside that window.

Months 1-2

Setup: prompt selection, monitoring in place, community mapping, technical review of what we plan to claim. At least 35 prompts and 5 subreddits before anything goes live.

Months 3-4

First posts and comments, A/B testing on angles. We cap the pace at 20 posts a month at this stage: volume comes after validation, not before it.

Months 5-6

We scale what got absorbed by the engines and widen to new prompts. This is where the curve stops being flat.

Two distinct timelines, often confused: roughly three weeks before your first appearances in AI answers, and roughly six months before a steady flow of leads.

Industries

Every corner of the infrastructure stack

Each corner has its own communities and its own queries. Below, the subreddit where the decision happens and the query type we work on it.

Hosting, VPS & bare metal

r/webhosting and r/VPS, on queries like "best VPS provider" or "who actually owns their hardware". Almost every comparison site in this category earns a commission, which is exactly why the unsponsored thread wins.

Self-hosted & open source

r/selfhosted and r/homelab, on queries like "self-hosted alternative to X". The fastest growing communities of the lot, and the ones where a managed tier gets adopted after someone has already run the free version for a year.

Storage, backup & data

r/DataHoarder and r/truenas, on queries like "best object storage for backups". A category where buyers publish their exact setup and their exact bill, which makes an honest comparison unusually easy to place.

DevOps, Kubernetes & observability

r/devops, r/kubernetes and r/sre, on queries like "is managed Kubernetes worth it at our size". Tooling adopted by the team that will be paged at 3am, which is a different buying logic entirely. The business-buyer side of the same market sits on our page for B2B software vendors.

Matéo Drouillard, founder of UpvotePartners
Founder

Matéo Drouillard

GEO pioneer · 30+ Reddit campaigns

On developer tools, Matéo set one rule the agency does not bend: nothing gets published that an engineer in the subreddit could disprove in one reply. No rounded-up benchmark, no feature claimed before it ships. On r/selfhosted and r/sysadmin a single falsifiable sentence costs the account, and the account is the asset.

An engineer by training, he founded UpvotePartners while looking for high-trust inbound acquisition channels, a constraint he first ran into on B2B security vendors and crypto infrastructure, which sells to the same technical audience. The agency turns down companies below roughly 50k EUR of MRR, because under that line the problem is usually the product, not the channel.

LinkedIn
Pricing

Developer marketing: a visibility target guaranteed by contract

A dev newsletter slot dies the week it goes out. We install your tool inside the comparison threads engineers keep reading from one migration to the next.

Starting at

€3,000 /month

4-month minimum commitment

A visibility target tailored to your category and your markets, guaranteed by contract

  • A monthly target set together and written into the contract
  • Pro-rata refund if the target is not reached
  • Units shipped to real testers, plus placement inside the comparison threads that already rank
  • Your threads at the top of Google, your brand cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini
  • Monthly performance report and strategy call

🔥 Very limited spots. We only take a few clients at a time.

Still not sure Reddit works for your product?

Click a button and ask the AIs directly whether Reddit is a good channel for a devtool or a hosting provider.

Ask ChatGPT Claude Ask Claude Perplexity Ask Perplexity

Everything about developer marketing.

Because the person who decides is not the person who signs. An engineer adopts a tool in a terminal, on a free tier, months before procurement hears the name. That evaluator does not read a white paper and does not click an ad: they read the docs, the changelog, and a thread where someone ran the thing in production and said what broke. Marketing that works here looks like documentation, not like marketing.

First posts go live within 31 days, after the mapping and warm-up phase. Google positions on the threads we work typically move within 4 to 8 weeks. First citations in AI answers land around 2 to 3 months, because an engine needs to see your tool across several independent sources before it stops treating the mention as noise. We ask for a 4-month minimum because the channel compounds rather than spikes.

It is our strongest vertical, and we can put a number on it. Across our client base, Reddit accounts for 37% of the sources AI engines cite when answering infrastructure questions, servers, hosting and VPS included. That is the highest share of any vertical we work, ahead of e-commerce and prospecting tools at around 31 to 35%. The reason is structural: on hosting and infrastructure, almost every comparison site earns an affiliate commission, so Reddit is the only unsponsored opinion that exists. The models know it and weight it accordingly.

Those communities remove vendor self-promotion on sight, and the comments finish whatever the moderators miss. We never post advertorials. Our accounts have real history and karma, answer technical questions unrelated to any client, and your tool comes up when it genuinely solves the problem someone described. One rule we hold to: we only comment on threads less than a month old, because moderators treat old-thread promotion as spam and because the model's crawler has already read that page and will not return for your comment.

We track presence across the prompts your buyers actually type, sentiment, position inside the answer, Google rankings on the threads we work, and signups traced back to them. What we deliberately do not count: upvotes and post views. Our tests show a post's score has no bearing on whether a model picks it up, so reporting it would be a vanity metric. Detailed report every month, plus a strategy call.

We say no more often than we say yes. Below roughly 50k EUR of MRR the bottleneck is usually the product or a fuzzy ICP, and faster channels should come first. We do not take e-commerce retailers or physical stores. Component manufacturers selling through distributors are out of scope too, because that market does not run on the vendor comparisons we work with. Consumer hardware brands launching a product are a different case, and we cover them on a dedicated page.

Our engagements start at 3,000 EUR/month with a 4-month minimum, because organic channels compound over time. The monthly target is set together, written into the contract, and you get a pro-rata refund if it is not reached. For comparison, running this in-house takes at least a half-time role for a team of 6 to 10 people. We always start with a free audit of your current visibility.