Renaming a launched product without losing anything

Two weeks after launching Conduit on Product Hunt, I renamed it. The product is now Toolport, and the launch survived: same Product Hunt page, same upvotes, same GitHub stars, same users. This post is the checklist I wish I’d had, because a rename is not a find-and-replace. It’s a migration across a dozen systems that don’t share a deploy button.

Why rename at all

The short version: too many other Conduits. The name collided with existing products in and around the developer-tools space, and every week of traction made the eventual rename more expensive. Two weeks post-launch was the cheapest moment I was ever going to get. If you’re sitting on a name collision and hoping it resolves itself, it won’t; it just gets pricier.

Toolport won because it says what the product is. Every tool, one port. It gave us a brand system for free (a porthole, a harbor, boats docking at one gateway), and the domain, GitHub org, and npm orgs were all available. Check all three before you fall in love with a name.

Claim everything before you announce anything

The order of operations matters more than any individual step. Names first, silently: domain, GitHub org, npm and PyPI, the Discord vanity, the social handle. Only then start renaming things people can see. The worst version of a rename is announcing the new name and then discovering someone registered the domain while you drafted the post.

The mechanical checklist

What it actually took, roughly in order:

The code. Three pull requests: the app rename, the follow-up cleanup, and the release pipeline (installer names, icons, the in-app updater endpoint). The GitHub repo rename itself is the easy part, and GitHub forwards the old URL.
The domains. toolport.app went live and conduitmcp.app now 301s to it, path and query intact, so every old backlink passes its authority along. One gotcha if your site is a Cloudflare Worker with static assets: by default a matching asset is served before your Worker runs, so a host-redirect in the Worker silently never fires on page URLs. run_worker_first: true fixes it. That one cost an hour.
What you never redirect: payment webhooks. Stripe still posts invoices to the old domain, and a 301 on a webhook is a silent way to stop getting paid. The API routes answer on both hosts indefinitely; only pages redirect.
Product Hunt. You don’t need to relaunch. Rename the page to “Toolport (formerly Conduit)” and the history, upvotes, and followers carry over. The parenthetical stays until the new name has settled.
SEO. Canonical tags on every page pointing at the new domain, a sitemap submitted to Search Console, and patience. The 301s do most of the work.
Everything else. The studio site (this one: 68 mentions across 19 files), the Discord welcome post, the README badges, the docs, the social banners. Grep is your friend; grep case-insensitively, and grep again the next day.

The things you deliberately don’t rename

This is the part nobody tells you. Toolport writes a gateway entry into each AI client’s config file, and that entry is still named conduit. Renaming it would orphan the entry in every existing user’s config: the app would stop recognizing its own installation and either duplicate it or, worse, break tools that were working yesterday. Nobody sees the internal name. Correctness beats cosmetic purity, so it stays, possibly forever, as a small fossil of the old name.

The same logic applies anywhere an identifier has shipped to someone else’s machine: keychain entries, config keys, protocol strings. Rename what people see; leave what machines depend on, and write a comment explaining the fossil so future-you doesn’t “fix” it.

What it cost

A few focused days spread across two weeks, most of it in the long tail of surfaces rather than the code. No user-visible downtime, no lost rankings so far, no lost Product Hunt history. The lesson I’d hand to anyone considering it: the rename itself is cheap, the coordination is the cost, and both only grow with time. If the name is wrong, it’s never going to be more affordable than right now.

Toolport is free and open source: one local gateway for every MCP server, with your keys in the OS keychain and about 90% fewer tool tokens. toolport.app.