Is Indiegogo InDemand (now Late Pledge) worth it after Kickstarter?

Here’s the thing. Everyone still asks me whether they should run Indiegogo InDemand after their Kickstarter closes, and the honest answer changed underneath us in October 2025.

I’ve launched a Kickstarter myself for Lifelong Deo 1.0, and afterwards I ran an Indiegogo InDemand campaign on top of it. I raised an additional £15k that way. Back then, InDemand actually worked. In 2026, as an official Kickstarter Expert Partner, I’m telling founders the opposite. Don’t bother. Here’s why.

First, a bit of housekeeping so both search queries land in the right place. InDemand doesn’t exist by that name anymore. Gamefound acquired Indiegogo in July 2025 and relaunched the platform on 16 October 2025. As part of that relaunch, InDemand was renamed Late Pledge. Functionally it’s roughly the same product (post-campaign pre-orders, continuous pledges, an upsell path via the pledge manager), but the thing that made the old InDemand worth running has quietly disappeared. If you want the wider platform comparison, I’ve written that up in Kickstarter vs Indiegogo in 2026. For the numeric comparison of Kickstarter and Indiegogo overall, traffic, backers, dollars raised and success rates, see Kickstarter vs Indiegogo by the numbers. This post is specifically about the post-campaign question.

What I actually did with Lifelong Deo 1.0

Let me tell you the story before I tell you the verdict, because the verdict only makes sense if you know what changed.

I launched Lifelong Deo 1.0 on Kickstarter. The campaign funded, the tail slowed down, and I did what a lot of hardware founders do next. I moved to Indiegogo InDemand to keep pre-orders flowing while manufacturing was starting. Total extra raised through InDemand: about £15k.

Now, I’d love to tell you that was all down to my brilliant marketing. It wasn’t. A big chunk of that £15k came from Indiegogo itself. They actively promoted the page. It showed up in the marketplace, it went out in their newsletter, it got tucked into their category browse pages. Real people were discovering Lifelong Deo on Indiegogo who’d never heard of the Kickstarter. That’s where the money came from.

The £15k wasn’t a “just point your Kickstarter audience at Indiegogo and print money” story. It was “Indiegogo has an audience, and they showed my page to that audience.” Big difference.

What quietly stopped after Gamefound

Somewhere in the transition from InDemand to Late Pledge, Indiegogo stopped pushing post-campaign pages the way they used to. From what I’ve seen and what founders I’ve talked to are reporting, Late Pledge campaigns no longer show up in the marketplace, they don’t get editorial features, and they don’t ride the newsletter push that InDemand used to enjoy.

What you get instead is a page. A perfectly functional page. That sits there. Waiting for you to send it traffic.

That is a completely different product to what I ran in 2020. It’s the shell of InDemand without the engine that made it worth the fee. Indiegogo hasn’t officially announced “we’ve stopped promoting Late Pledge pages”, as far as I can tell. But look at the marketplace, look at their category pages, look at where your traffic would actually come from if you set one up today. It’s not there.

The static-page problem

Once you accept that Late Pledge is a page you drive all the traffic to yourself, the obvious question follows. Why not just keep driving that traffic to your existing Kickstarter post-campaign page?

Because Kickstarter also leaves your campaign page up after the campaign closes. It’s the exact same setup. A static landing page with your video, your rewards, your story, and a way for people to sign up to be notified when you re-launch or open pre-orders elsewhere. Kickstarter isn’t promoting it either, but your audience already knows where it is. Your backers linked to it, your press coverage linked to it, your Google Search Console impressions are landing on it.

If you move all your post-campaign traffic to Late Pledge, you’re pointing your ad spend, your email list, and your PR at a fresh URL that hasn’t earned any of that history. You lose the SEO tail. You lose the backer social proof that lives on the Kickstarter page. And you pay a platform fee for the privilege.

That’s the argument in one paragraph. Two static pages with no promotion behind them, and you’re being asked to migrate traffic from the one with existing equity to the one without.

Trying to work out what to actually do after your Kickstarter closes? My £60 strategy call is the fastest way to get an honest, project-specific answer rather than a generic checklist.

When Late Pledge might still (barely) make sense

I want to be fair to the current product because there is a case for it, and I’ve seen a couple of founders make it work. It’s just narrower than the marketing suggests.

If you’re running a heavy direct-to-consumer paid ads campaign to your post-campaign page and you specifically want the pledge manager tooling baked in, Late Pledge does that. Gamefound has built out the pledge manager stage since taking over, and if you don’t want to bolt on BackerKit or CrowdOx separately, having the pledge management inside the platform where the pledges are collected is neat. Neat, not essential.

The other edge case: if you originally launched on Indiegogo, staying on Indiegogo for Late Pledge is fine because your entire backer base already has accounts there. The friction is low, the fee structure historically favoured campaigns that launched on-platform, and there’s no migration story to sell. But if you launched on Kickstarter, you’re inventing that migration story from scratch, and asking backers to create Indiegogo accounts to give you more money is a weirdly high-friction ask for what you get.

That’s it. Two situations. Neither of them applies to most Kickstarter-first hardware founders.

What to do post-Kickstarter instead

If Late Pledge isn’t the answer, what is? Three options, roughly in order of how much most founders should care about them.

First, a proper pledge manager. BackerKit or CrowdOx. Both handle address collection, add-on upsells, and pre-order continuation. Add-on revenue from the pledge manager stage is often where a campaign’s real margin gets made, and neither of those platforms cares which crowdfunding platform you originally launched on. This is the boring, high-return move that everyone underrates.

Second, a Shopify pre-order funnel. Set up a lightweight DTC store, run ads to it, take the pre-orders yourself. You own the customer relationship, you own the email list, you take a smaller cut of each sale. If your campaign got press, that press keeps sending traffic somewhere for months. Send it to a page you own, not to a page you rent.

Third, and only if the numbers support it, plan a second Kickstarter. If you’ve got a genuine V2, a colour variant, an accessory line, or a follow-up product, a second Kickstarter with the same backer base tends to fund faster than the first one did. That’s a much better use of your post-campaign momentum than a static Late Pledge page. If you’re weighing this up, my £60 strategy call is designed for exactly that call.

The turn

Here’s my actual opinion. Indiegogo InDemand in 2020 was a real thing worth paying for. Indiegogo Late Pledge in 2026 is a static page with a platform fee attached. The value was always the promotion, and the promotion is gone.

I’m not saying the Gamefound team have done anything wrong. They’re building for their own audience, which is tabletop and board games, and that audience does get looked after. If you’re launching a game, the picture is different, and you should look at Indiegogo and Gamefound seriously. But if you launched a hardware or design product on Kickstarter and you’re wondering whether to bolt on a Late Pledge campaign to squeeze out more, my honest answer is don’t bother. Put that same energy into a pledge manager, a Shopify funnel, or planning campaign number two.

Post-campaign traffic is the same no matter where you send it. Send it to something you actually own.

Want a hand with yours?

If you’re at the “Kickstarter’s closed, now what” stage right now, I can help you skip a fortnight of second-guessing. My £60 strategy call is one hour on video where I look at your campaign, your numbers, and your options, and tell you what I’d do next. Late Pledge, pledge manager, Shopify, or a second Kickstarter, you’ll leave with a clear answer.

If you want more than that, my £3,000 campaign video service covers the video most founders need for a re-launch or a second campaign, and my £5,000 done-for-you package takes the whole thing off your plate if you’d rather focus on manufacturing. Start with the strategy call. It’s the cheapest way to work out which of those you actually need.