What you can't sell on Kickstarter in 2026

Most of what you will read about Kickstarter’s banned list is wrong, and it is wrong in an expensive direction.

The rules were rewritten. Things that were prohibited are not any more, several things that nobody used to mention now are, and founders are still quoting a version from years ago at each other in forums. I went through the current list properly this week because a client asked me a question I could not answer from memory.

What you can’t sell on Kickstarter, as the rules actually stand

Here is the current prohibited list, in plain terms:

• Cryptocurrencies and NFTs, and equity of any kind
• Service businesses — travel agents, life coaching, food delivery. Projects cannot be centred on providing a service
• Marketplaces — physical or virtual spaces whose main purpose is selling or reselling
• AI companions that offer romantic or sexual companionship, or that primarily advertise to children or their parents
• Items claiming to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent a serious illness or condition, sexual dysfunction included
• Items claiming to prevent serious injury or death
• Contests, raffles and gambling
• Energy food and drinks, unless the primary ingredient is coffee beans or herbal tea
• Alcohol
• Live animals, fish or birds, and human or animal body parts or fluids
• Drugs and paraphernalia, including nicotine, tobacco, kava, psychedelics and cannabis
• Weapons and replicas presented in a way that implies they can harm a person or animal, including weapon accessories
• Knives without a clearly defined non-violent purpose — switchblades, gravity and ballistic knives, and disguised knives

Read that list again if you have been working from an older one, because two entries on it catch people out badly.

Supplements are not banned, and that surprises people

This is the correction worth making loudest, because I have watched founders abandon perfectly viable products on the strength of advice that is simply no longer true.

Supplements and vitamins do not appear on the prohibited list. What is prohibited is any item claiming to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent a serious illness or condition. Those are different things.

So a vitamin, a protein powder or a wellness product can be crowdfunded. What cannot be crowdfunded is the claim. The moment your page says the thing treats a condition, prevents a disease or fixes a diagnosed problem, you have crossed from an allowed product into a prohibited claim — and the product did not change, only the words did.

In practice this means the risk is in your copywriting, not your formulation. Founders in this category usually get themselves rejected by writing an enthusiastic benefits section rather than by choosing the wrong product.

The energy drink rule sits next to this and is stranger than it looks. Energy food and drinks are out, except where the primary ingredient is coffee beans or herbal tea. A coffee product is fine. A caffeinated formula built around anything else is not, and there is no interpretation to argue about — the exception is written into the rules in those words.

The additions nobody has caught up with

Three of these are recent enough that most guides do not mention them at all.

Crypto, NFTs and equity. Kickstarter is for making a thing and giving it to backers. Anything that is really a financial instrument is out, and that includes projects that dress a token up as a reward.

AI companions. Specifically ones offering romantic or sexual companionship, and ones aimed primarily at children or their parents. This is a new category of product and Kickstarter has drawn a line around part of it.

Service businesses and marketplaces. If the project is fundamentally about setting up a service or a place where things get sold, it is not a project in Kickstarter’s sense. This one has always been true in spirit under the “Kickstarter is not a store” idea, but it is now written down explicitly.

The rule that catches more people than the banned list

Almost nobody gets rejected for trying to sell a switchblade. They get rejected on this instead: projects must create something new to share with others.

Rewards have to be new and unique, and produced or designed by the project or one of its collaborators. A finished product that exists and only needs a marketing budget is not a project. Buying stock wholesale and reselling it with a nicer page is not a project.

Alongside it sits a requirement that trips up people trying to be clever with pre-launch: projects should be clearly and fully presented at the time of submission, and substantial edits that change the core of a project after submission may result in cancellation.

That does not mean you cannot submit early with placeholder tiers and a placeholder goal — you can, and you should, because approval takes three to six business days and unlocks your pre-launch page. It means the thing you submit has to be recognisably the thing you launch. Swapping the product, changing what backers receive, or restructuring the whole proposition after approval is the behaviour that rule exists to stop.

Not sure which side of the line your product sits on? The free 20-question eligibility quiz walks through the current rules in about two minutes.

Design and technology projects have their own bar

If you are making hardware, one more rule applies specifically to you, and it is the most common cause of rejection in the category.

Your prototype demonstration must reflect the product’s current state, with no CGI or special effects showing functionality that does not yet exist. If the product needs software and hardware to work together, you have to show that working or say plainly that it has not been built yet.

This is stricter than founders expect. A beautiful render of a product that does not exist is not a prototype demonstration, and a video that implies a feature you have not built is the thing reviewers are looking for. The hero image post covers what this means for your campaign visuals, and the manufacturing post covers getting a real prototype made in time to photograph it.

App projects sit under the same requirement: they must fit an existing category, be based on original creative thinking, and demonstrate a prototype.

AI is allowed, with conditions

Worth stating clearly because there is a lot of anxiety about it.

As long as there is human creativity and human involvement, AI use is permitted. What is prohibited is excessive AI use, meaning projects with little to no human thought in creating or executing them. And you must be transparent: explain how AI was used, in the disclosure Kickstarter asks for.

So AI-assisted imagery, copy and design are fine. A project that is essentially an AI output with a founder’s name on it is not. The line is human involvement, and the requirement is that you say what you did.

Two things that apply on top

Stripe’s restricted business list. Kickstarter’s partners can refuse a project that Kickstarter’s own rules allow, and Stripe’s list is broader in places. If your product is unusual, check both.

Business disclosure. Where a project is launched on behalf of a business or other legal entity, that entity’s information has to be disclosed and clearly presented to backers. Decide whether you are launching as an individual or a company before you start identity verification, because it determines which ID and which bank account you supply, and changing it later means going back through the checks.

What to do if you are rejected

It is not the end, and it is usually fixable.

Kickstarter tells you the rule you fell foul of rather than leaving you guessing, and in most cases the problem is presentation rather than the product. A claim that needs removing. A description that reads like a shop listing rather than a project. A prototype section that shows renders where it needs photographs.

Fix the specific thing, resubmit, and expect another three to six business days. What you should not do is resubmit the same project with cosmetic changes hoping for a different reviewer — that wastes another week and the second answer is usually the same as the first.

If the rejection is genuinely about the category rather than the presentation, that is worth knowing early too. Better to find out now than after you have spent three months building a list for a campaign that was never going to run.

Key takeaways

• Supplements are not banned. Medical claims are.
• Energy drinks are out unless the primary ingredient is coffee beans or herbal tea.
• Crypto, NFTs, equity, service businesses and marketplaces are all prohibited.
• AI companions offering romantic company are banned; AI as a tool is allowed with disclosure.
• The rule that rejects most projects is “create something new”, not the banned list.
• Design and Technology projects must show a real prototype, with no CGI standing in for functionality that does not exist.
• Stripe’s restricted list applies on top and can block a project Kickstarter allows.
• Disclose business entity details if you are launching as a company rather than an individual.

Not sure where your product sits?

Most of the genuinely borderline cases I see are not really about the banned list. They are about whether the thing counts as creating something new, or whether the claims on the page have wandered into territory the product itself never occupied.

Both are fixable, and both are much cheaper to fix before you submit than after a rejection. If you want a second pair of eyes on it, a £60 strategy call is sixty minutes and usually settles it in the first ten.