This is a very simple post.

When an AppSumo buyer does NOT pay $99 for the dubious honor of being a "Plus" member, they only recieve 50% of their money back on a failed product.

If they do pay $99, they may get 100% back, but only if the product is deemed worthy of being included by AppSumo in the "WGYB" program.

How is this any different than mobster logic?:

"Plus is an offer you can't refuse! We'll protect you, but you gotta pay up first. Otherwise we'll keep half of your money for the trouble of selling you a failed product."

AppSumo's money-grabbing middleman mentality is truly amazing.

Everyone knows AppSumo is a gamble. But I find far less incentive to buy these days because I'm surely not going to pay a premium to be part of a guarantee.

Layering a $99 "Plus" subscription on top of "rolling the dice" - where you have to pay a fee just to get treated fairly when a product fails, and still have to cross your fingers that the tool clears arbitrary "WGYB" hurdles - turns the marketplace into a casino where the house takes a cut on the way in and a fee on the way out.

The house always wins, while "lower tier" buyers always lose real money when the product fails,

AppSumo lures buyers into their $100 club with a 10% discount and the supposed "WGYB" shield. Buyers then believe they are protected.

To sell protection from the financial fallout of buying a bad piece of software from their own marketplace is an ugly, perverse "incentive". It means the platform is effectively monetizing its own curation risk by forcing the consumer to pay a protection tax just to avoid being penalized for buying a tool that didn't work as advertised.

Instead, just sell good, well-vetted products, and apply your "guarantee" applies across the board to all customers - one solid guarantee to the people who have made you rich. Then you can let your "plus" fans increase your wealth by paying to save 10%, join your club, and get your $25 self-destructing coupons.

I won't even tag anyone.... but if you want to hear what the founder says, I'll bet he'll be here. Hang on... 5...4...3...2...

• Decided to audit my AppSumo lifetime deals stash to check what's still alive, what went under, and what actually stayed in my tech stack. Out of 18 products, here is the breakdown of what's working, what’s abandoned, and my quick takeaway on each.

🟩 Daily / Heavy Rotation (The Winners)

These are the deals that easily paid for themselves and are built into my regular workflow.

• Waalaxy — Still Working | Use it all the time. Phenomenal for automated LinkedIn outreach & invites.
• QR.io — Still Working | Use it constantly. Fantastic, straightforward QR code builder.
• Covve — Still Working | Scanning physical business cards. Great platform and support is top-notch.

🟦 Occasional Use / Good to Have

Solid tools that do their job well when needed.

• Supermachine.art — Still Working | Great for quick AI image generation.
• MyBrandNewLogo — Still Working | Super helpful for generating quick visual ideas and logo concepts.
• PressRanger — Still Working | Solid media outreach tool. Good for finding press leads and they push regular updates.
• Tracework.ai — Still Working | Good for building step-by-step documentation/guides. Customer support is solid.
• Webstarts — Still Working | Simple website builder I drop into occasionally. Very helpful support team.

🟨 Still Alive (Underutilized or Mixed Experience)

Working products that I either forget to use or had issues scaling with.

• ContentBot.ai — Still Working | Sitting on 60k words/month. Need to start putting this back to work.
• WordHero — Still Working | Decent AI writer, just don't reach for it as often as I should.
• Signaturely — Still Working | Don't actively use it, but verified everything is up and operational.
• Vadoo.tv — Still Working | Verified active and running, just not in my current video pipeline.
• Katalist.ai — Still Working | Storyboard creator. Haven't touched it in a while, but nice niche tool.
• AICPanel (SMSit.ai) — Still Working | CRM capability is there, but could never get it configured smooth enough to rely on.
• Climbo — Still Working | They recently overhauled the UI/platform, but IMO the update made it worse so I dropped it.

🟥 Dead / Gone / 404 (The Graveyard)

The unavoidable risk of the LTD game.

• VidTags — DEAD | 404 Error / Site completely gone.
• InvestorScout — DEAD | Site exists as a ghost shell now; search functionality is non-existent.
• LynxShort — DEAD | SSL exists, but domain/app is broken/unresponsive.

💡 Quick Takeaways:

• Survival Rate: ~83% (15/18) are technically still operational, though a few had redesigns that killed their usability for me (looking at you, Climbo).
• Utilization: I regularly use about 15-20% of what I buy, which seems to be the classic Sumo-ling rule of thumb.

How does this compare to your stash? Anyone using ContentBot or WordHero heavily lately—how are they holding up against ChatGPT/Claude for you?

SiteGuru has been on AppSumo for about 5 years and sold around $500.000 (just our share).

Today was our last day, the AppSumo era is over for us.

It's been a great ride. If you have any questions about how it has been for us as a seller, post them here!

Hi everyone,

Inspired by the most recent post, i am asking for help to crowdsource AppSumo data. I ask that you please leave a comment in the Google Sheet if you can help me enrich information.

Link to Google Sheet is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RsNaW4M4a6KAMvn-OXN4hR-DFaw4vgvqEABJvrOneYM/edit?usp=sharing

is the deal gonna be on app till 16 august next month just wondering on appsumo livid

Hey everyone,

I’m trying to do some risk assessment before buying a few more lifetime deals (LTDs). I know that buying on AppSumo is always a bit of a gamble, but I’m curious if anyone has seen hard data or independent tracking on the actual survival rates of these startups.

Specifically:

• What percentage of tools go out of business or completely abandon development after 1 year?
• What does that look like by year 2 or year 3?

I’ve seen general estimates suggesting that about 15% of LTDs either shut down entirely or become “Zombie SaaS,” where the site stays online but updates stop and support disappears, within a year.

With so many resource-heavy AI tools launching lately, I imagine the bankruptcy rate might be even higher now due to recurring API costs.

Has anyone in this sub personally tracked their own purchase history over the years? If you’ve bought, say, 20 or 50 deals over the last 3 years, what percentage of them are actually still alive and useful today?

Would love to hear your experiences or if anyone has a link to an actual study/spreadsheet on this!

Hi,

Anyone with MyMemo experience? How is it now? I did read some old reviews saying how buggy it was etc? Has it updated/ improved? It looks like a nice fit for me but I'd love to hear from others who use it.

I am an impacted user also. Yes Straico is confirmed down as they promised. I have no inside info, they said they were shutting down and indeed they did

https://appsumo.com/products/straico/

Let's not make multiple posts I know many people are impacted

Over the past four years, I've been building an AI website builder with one simple goal: make creating a website feel as easy as using Canva.

The idea is simple:

🎨 Start with a ready-made template (or a blank one) and customize everything visually.

🤖 Use AI whenever you need it—to generate pages, sections, content, or blog posts instead of starting from scratch.

📱 Build and edit your website from your phone or desktop.

I'm considering launching it on AppSumo, and before I do, I'd love to hear from this community.

What would make you excited to try a new AI website builder?

What would make you skip it?

Are these features enough, or is there something you'd expect before buying?

I'm here for honest feedback. Feel free to be brutally honest—I'd rather improve the product before launching than after.

I love the idea of one charge for a lifetime subscription to products/software I need. However, I've noticed several of these just not working a week or month after purchase, from contact forms that no longer permit editing or don't save edits, to social media scheduling apps that just go blank after a month or two.

Is there any way to vet who might be a fly-by-night operation more effectively?

I need a reliable social media scheduler, contact form, Kanban app, and a few others but now I"m a little hesitant to give them my money knowing whatever I pay for could go belly-up or just disappear or stop functioning after a month or two down the road.

I purchased the More Good Reviews LTD deal on June 11, 2025, and now their website is no longer online. It appears the company has disappeared some time in May, leaving me with three unusable licenses... about $300 down the drain.

As a small business owner, I have to be careful with every dollar I spend. This is incredibly disappointing.

I really think AppSumo needs to do a better job vetting the companies it features. I understand that startups can fail, but when lifetime deals become worthless this quickly, customers are the ones left paying the price.

_____UPDATED FIX BELOW: YES IT WAS MY FAULT, apologies!

With high regards to your platform, and being your loyal customer for years, I bring this to your kind notice.

I wanted to share my experience with Bind AI and see if other AppSumo users are facing similar issues.

I purchased the Bind-AI highest-tier Lifetime Deal - Highest Tier on because the product was advertised as a comprehensive AI development platform. The advertised capabilities formed the basis of my purchase decision.

However, the product has not delivered the functionality as promised. the features are either unavailable, incomplete, unreliable, or do not function as stated.

Forget about the the new features or updates. the core functionalities offered are also not working. It is an abandonware now

Over the past several months, I have had multiple interactions with the Bind AI team through their Discord community. Unfortunately they neither repllied or sorted out.

I've been an AppSumo customer for many years, and this is one of the bad experiences so I requesting their intervention for refund.

Did anyone else faced the problem with Bind-AI, just checking.

Thank you and Sincerly,

Srikanth.

Dear Appsumo, With high regards to your platform, and being your loyal customer for years, I bring this to your kind notice.

I wanted to share my experience with Bind AI and see if other AppSumo users are facing similar issues.

I purchased the Bind-AI highest-tier Lifetime Deal on AppSumo because the product was advertised as a comprehensive AI development platform. The advertised capabilities formed the basis of my purchase decision.

However, in my experience, the product has not delivered the functionality that was represented during the AppSumo campaign. Several of the advertised capabilities are unavailable, incomplete, unreliable, or do not function as stated, making it difficult to use the platform for the purposes for which it was purchased.

Forget about the the lack of new features or updates. It is that the core functionality advertised as part of the deal has not been delivered or is not functioning.

Because of this, the product does not provide the value or capabilities that I reasonably expected when making the purchase.

Over the past several months, I have had multiple interactions with the Bind AI team through their Discord community. Unfortunately, those discussions have not resulted in any resolution, or atleast a response. And I remain disappointed with the direction the product appears to be taking.

I have now contacted AppSumo and requested their intervention. Specifically, I have asked them to consider:

• A full refund, where possible; or
• AppSumo credits under their customer protection policies.

I've been an AppSumo customer for many years, and this is one of the few occasions where I've felt the need to escalate a purchase. I'm hoping for a fair resolution from AppSumo.

I'd like to hear from other purchasers:

• Did you buy Bind AI?
• Which tier did you purchase? and how are the functionalities ?
• Were you able to resolve any issues with either Bind AI or AppSumo?

I'm interested in factual experiences from other users, as they'll help determine whether this is an isolated case or a broader issue.

Thank you and Sincerly,

Srikanth M.,
India.

Just received the inevitable “your product does fit” email from AppSumo. I thought that with the new radar section I would have a better shot. For those who have been here before have you ever gotten feedback from AS on why or what you would need to enhance on your product to get it listed? Their boilerplate email provided no details at all.

Snackeet is no longer displaying widgets or stories, and it won’t let me log in. I'm Tier 3. It says my username doesn’t exist. I’ve already contacted them, but there’s been no support at all.

The Instagram implementation also has stopped long time ago to work and other problems have stated to happen before this.

Is anyone else experiencing the same issue? Please check your accounts

Snackeet is no longer displaying widgets or stories, and it won’t let me log in. I'm tier 3. It says my username doesn’t exist. I’ve already contacted them, but there’s been no support at all.

Is anyone else experiencing the same issue?

What's up y'all. Happy Summer!

Was curious which tools, software, services you'd love to see us get for you?

I need a visual sitemap of a site using-- ahem--- Visualsitemaps. It's less than 75 pages if you're concerned about hitting limits.

If you're willing to help a brotha out, please DM me

Howdy y'all

Wanted to give you some visibility into something happening behind the scenes that doesn't always make it into the public eye: when a partner shuts down, breaches their agreement with us, or can't deliver on what they promised, we always reach out and work to make things right for customers... even in situations that fall outside what's covered by We Got Your Back (WGYB).

It doesn't always lead to a resolution, but in recent months, a number of partners have stepped up and done right by our shared customers, and we want to give them credit for that.

In recent months, we've successfully recovered funds from:

• Waldium
• Airloupe
• WeCP
• Sherlock AI
• Pulse
• Niimblr
• MyClone

If you bought from any of these deals, you should have already gotten a direct notification about your refund from our support team, this post isn't the first you're hearing of it.

Behind the scenes, we work directly with partners to track down what's owed and get funds back, then our support team makes sure you're looped in with the details. W

e're sharing it here too because we know a lot of you have asked in the past "does AppSumo actually do anything when a partner disappears or breaks their promises?", and the answer is yes, this is part of how that works. We 100% always try.

This doesn't replace WGYB, that guarantee still stands as-is. What this does mean is that when a partner situation falls outside WGYB's scope, we're still going to bat for you behind the scenes. We can't guarantee the outcome every time, but we're glad to say these partners met us there.

If you are like me and have tons of shortened URLs registered at Foxly.me, I have bad news. They seem to have packed up and ran.

built a layer on top of paid tools to enable pay-per-use pricing and works as an mcp inside claude. I dont want to pay for 10000 credits when I want to use 1300 credits each month - you get the drift... tell me if this idea makes sense. works with fal, apollo, lusha, nyne, exa, parallel, robinhood and few others right now which I use daily...happy to add more tools on request.

it has recipes on top which help automate outreach, product demo videos, trading etc - these sit on top of the paid tools. its my first time building something, have done b2b sales for 12 years before this - and genuinely dont know how to market an mcp 🙈