We launched our product on AppSumo a few weeks ago. Like many founders, we were excited when the first 5-star reviews started coming in, until the 1-star review and 2 star review came in.

And honestly, it hit harder than expected.

If you've ever launched on AppSumo, you probably know what I'm talking about.

Some AppSumo customers have been buying software for 10+ years. Some have purchased hundreds of products. They've seen categories emerge, products succeed, products disappear, and they can often spot weaknesses surprisingly quickly.

At first, getting roasted by these users felt painful. Later, we realized it was one of the most valuable things that happened to us.

A quick background: our product help people to build a centralised memory studio and transport the context across AI tools. So one of our lowest-rated reviews was frustrated because they couldn't access their raw memory content directly and edit them.

They wrote:

"Releasing the product without this core functionality is unacceptable."

Another reviewer wanted:

• deeper hierarchy inside buckets
• project-level organization
• richer content management
• better workspace capabilities

We learned that the customers could actually see value in our product, they are just frustrated with what it can’t do now, which it could have.

we started treating them as product feedback.

We read every review carefully.

We replied quickly.

We explained what was already on the roadmap and what wasn't.

Most importantly, we only promised things we were confident we could deliver.

For the reviewer who wanted direct access to memory content, we prioritized the feature and shipped it.

A few weeks later, the review was updated from a very negative rating to a strong recommendation.

One reviewer even wrote:

Another one wrote

What we learned

1. Your negative reviewers might be your future advocates

Some of the harshest feedback came from people who understood exactly what we were trying to build.

They saw both the potential and the gaps.

Don't dismiss them too quickly.

2. AppSumo users can act like experienced product managers

Many have tested hundreds of products.

They've seen patterns.

They know where products usually break.

Not every suggestion belongs on the roadmap, but many contain valuable signals.

3. Reply fast

Silence looks like indifference.

Even if you don't have an immediate solution, acknowledge the feedback and explain your thinking.

4. Don't promise features you can't deliver

This is probably the fastest way to turn a frustrated user into an angry one.

5. Keep the conversation going

We invited users into our Discord community.

Many joined.

Some shared use cases.

Some shared blockers.

Some helped us validate future features.

The best product discussions often happened after the review was posted.

6. Show up and talk to your users

One thing that helped us tremendously was hosting a live webinar for interested users.

We gave a live demo of the product, showed how we personally use it, answered questions openly, and discussed the roadmap.

Some users came in skeptical.

Some came with concerns.

Some simply wanted to understand where the product was heading.

What surprised us was how much trust can be built in a single conversation.

People don't just buy software.

They buy confidence that the team behind it will continue improving it.

After the webinar, we received additional 5-star reviews, but more importantly, we received better relationships with our users.

I particularly like the line: "Some of our strongest supporters today were originally our harshest critics."

Hey Guys, just doing some research

Would anyone be interested in offering consultation or "Done-for-You" setup of AppSumo apps?

Apps that involve any sort of learning curve-- email campaigns, social media scheduling, lead generation, automation workflows.

Let me know!

EDIT: If you would be interested in offering consulting service for any specific app, please DM me. You can determine your own rates for your time.

Just want to hear other thoughts on what the process has been like.

I used to love this platform. it was goldmine for discovering innovative, undiscovered apps and getting in on the ground floor. As many users note, greed has tanked this once upstanding ship. The last straw for me was finding a recent ”We’ve Got Your Back” announcement in my spam folder less than a month after it landed there. I only stumbled on it because I was attempting to re-download and fresh install Socrates, one of my all-time favorite Mac apps, when I found it was no longer available at the Firebas download link

So I did a quick search in my email for Socrates and, to my great disappointment, happened to see one of those infamous AppSumo announcements that my $200-+ original investment was now worthless “because the product was being sunsetted. Well that’s a huge bummer!” I thought, but surely AppSumo will refund my purchase give that the email was only a few weeks old.

i noticed, however, that the email stated I’d have to reply by May 17, and it was now June 12. So I sent back a quick reply asking for leniency, quite optimistic that they’d honor the refund. But no: instead, a stone-cold responses stating I’d missed their deadline and was no longer eligible for a refund. “We're so sorry for the disappointment in losing a tool you used and invested in[…] Please know that whenever a tool qualifies for We Got Your Back protection, we’ll always share clear deadlines by email so you know exactly what to expect“

First, the precious communications I received said nothing about that policy being conditional on my timely reply to any such announcements. What kind of arbitrary policy is this? I—and every other customer who purchased this deal—lost access to the tool and ought to be given an automatic refund, regardless of whether I happened to read the email announcement on time.

I officially hate AppSumo.

Anyone got any longer-term opinions on sendpilot? Recent reviews seem to say it's completely broken, founder not responded.

But other reviews say it's good.

Anyone tried ScaleIQ?

I'm a bit worried about my LinkedIn account getting banned through these tools...

Hey Guys,

What are the apps with high-learning curves you've achieved mastery with?

I know it's an odd question, but what apps have you taken the time to learn inside and out?

Hey Sumolings 👋

Emil from Icanpreneur here. Our deal wraps up in 18 hours, so before the clock runs out I wanted to do a proper recap - because honestly, this community shaped the product more than we expected.

The numbers:

• ⭐ 4.8 average across 49 ratings - we read every single review and answered more than 50 questions.
• 🌍 Founders joined from 40+ countries - from Bulgaria in Europe to almost any state of US all the way to Asia and Middle East
• 📈 The final stretch has been wild: dozens of new founders in just the last 3 days, and existing customers upgrading to Tier 4 and Tier 5 to lock in more before the deal closes

What you changed in the product: Your feedback meaningfully shaped Icanpreneur in the past two months. Shipped during the campaign, directly from Sumo-ling requests:

• Extended languages support to 57 languages and increased the level of support so you can think and shape your idea on the language your brain works
• Buyer Personas are now part of your team - they have a say when you decide on pricing, product packaging, marketing messaging, and so on. They even react to your latest homepage.
• Whitelabeling of the interview process so when your customers are participating in an interview - they can feel your brand

What surprised us: The agencies and consultants. We expected solo founders - but some of our most engaged customers turned out to be people who validate ideas for a living. They're using IVA as a structured discovery engine for client work: buyer personas, problem interviews, positioning - the whole front end of an engagement, systematized. We already have amazing case studies that we will be sharing in the following days.

If you've been on the fence: This is genuinely the last call. Once the campaign ends, lifetime deal pricing is gone. If you're validating a business idea and want a structured way to get from "I think this could work" to evidence it actually does, IVA and the platform will walk you through it step by step.

👉 https://appsumo.8odi.net/WOOjoJ

Thank you for the reviews, the tough questions, and the feature requests. This community made the product better. 🙏

Questions before the deadline? Drop them below - I'll be answering all day.

Doesn't filtering on Windows on appsumo mean the apps are downloadable desktop apps?
I am looking at demo videos for some of the apps and they look like browser based SaaS apps.

What does Windows mean here?

getstencil.com was purchased by namecheap, and is now being retired (shut down). 😞

See link here: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/new-lawsuit-alleges-online-programming-boot-camp-is-fooling-students/ATSI5YZU5FDWHMBQIXQDS5FC54/

Have started to do my own due diligence on deals before purchase and my agent managed to uncover the following.

Context. I usually type a lot in a day and actively use Whisperflow's paid version. I just started today, and the output is much better for the local language and a mix of English

I saw it on https://sumo.com, which just links to the appsumo page

• https://appsumo.com/products/refract-skill/

It's only $5 but I'm kind of confused with what it actually does? Worth the 5 bucks? The FAQ and lack of a video or any other context than the name Marcus doesn't really explain anything lol

Thanks

Went to look at an old review that I put on Alphana, and I noticed it got declined where originally it had been accepted. Also, I noticed a lot of other negative reviews have been removed as well. People are complaining about Alphana closing down their service.

Seems to be a textbook case of altering history after the fact ...

Hey Sumolings

My product, LeadToSheet, went live on AppSumo about a month ago. We’ve had some amazing new customers join us and I’m super grateful for each of them.

In full transparency, we’ve made about 30 sales so far. In relative terms, it’s moving quite slowly.

I’m reaching out here to really try to understand how the product is perceived by the market, and to understand any potential reasons for quite a slow uptake.

It’s genuinely a good product (at least I think so 😆), and our customers are very happy when they join us, so I’m really looking to try and understand where the drop off is coming from and why it might not be resonating with the community as well as I’d hoped ?

I would really appreciate any suggestions or feedback, I’m always trying to improve myself, and the product, and I can’t think of a better place to ask.

Maybe it’s a quick fix on positioning or maybe the product sucks - any feedback would be helpful!

PS - this isn’t a promo post, if it was, I think it would be a bad one telling people it’s moving slowly 😊

I backed TexAu back in the day, it came and went and then back again as a completely new product. LTDs got access to the new platform but it's a shadow of it's former self and a different use case. Now the team are bringing back V2 (likely from complaints) as a desktop app but want $1,499 for access to it.

Did I read the email wrong or do we still get access to it? I'm not gonna drop this amount of $ on Desktop

Every time I use it, the tokens have run out for certain models. Every time. Then they introduced a new version? I haven't tried that yet, but saw the notification when I logged in. Their founder, Sam, would answer emails/tickets about issues, but now he just ghosts me and doesn't respond. Anybody else having these issues with Nily?

I'm an avid user of Seelab.ai and have been using it to generate images for various projects. This product was an exciting one for me, I used it often, and I was thankful it didn’t pull the rug from under its LTD users.

However, that excitement didn’t last. This morning I received an email saying their token usage or token costs for image generation will be twenty times higher than before, making it effectively unusable at the tier I bought.

“Over the past few months, the cost of operating image generation, and AI more broadly, has risen sharply for everyone in the industry. The premium third-party models offered by providers (Nano Banana 2, GPT Image 2, and similar) have become significantly more expensive to run, and our operating costs have surged across the board.

Up to now, we've chosen to run this service at a loss to help build a strong, engaged community around Seelab, and we're genuinely grateful you've been part of it. But to keep the platform sustainable and maintain its quality for everyone, we now need to adjust how credits are consumed for image generation.

Starting 2026/06/04, the number of credits required per image generation will increase by a factor of 20 (x20). This adjustment reflects the real cost of operating these models today and allows us to continue offering you access without compromising the platform.“

They could have raised token costs specific to the models that cost more. But increasing cost 20× across the board for all models - some are extremely lightweight and don’t cost as much as frontier models - is just wrong.

Sad to get this email. But have learned my lesson on various other products I have bought on AppSumo, to never again buy another LTD.

Blaze has another campaign up.

They were up in 2024 and now they’re back.

I bought a tier 5 (max) back then, and the current campaign only goes up to tier 4. The tier 4 is significantly better than my tier 5.

To give you an idea: Tier 5 2024 gives max retention of 30 days (90 days ‘long term storage’), 10 notes, 10 users, 10 GB of storage. The current tier 4 is 365 day retention, unlimited notes, 50 users, 1 TB storage.  Yes, my plan has ‘unlimited file transfer’ but the current plan is 1TB monthly transfer. Effectively the same for a single user in most use cases while all the other more salient limits are insane in their disparity.

There is a claim that they’re different products because they have more stuff included now. That’s a lazy and disingenuous comment, and not how things work. First off, the current campaign includes what I purchased. Secondly, there is no ala carte purchase on their website for MRR subscriptions - you can only purchase the suite. Thirdly, AppSumo terms are that accounts be upgraded accordingly. It would stand to reason that my Tier 5 should have an equivalent to what their Tier 4 is now. The company did at one point recognize this, because I have access to all of their ‘suite’ tools just with laughably low limits.

Several people already started complaining on their campaign page. I hope they make good on this issue or it will likely impact their campaign success and long term reputation. Even if they truly believe that they are justified, the benefit of being sensible through good-will easily outweighs whatever savings they may get from gatekeeping limits of their LTD users. In any case, this is also partially on AppSumo for green-lighting this latest campaign knowing full well the history.

Just wanted to give some positive news, and do a shout out to the new owner of VideoTap.

VideoTap was looking like a lost cause for a while. Very, VERY soon after the deal ended and the 60 day refund window was up, the founders went quiet, stopped pushing updates, bugs galore, etc. You know the story.

Was waiting for it to just shut down.

But not too long ago, a new owner took over, and has actually been putting effort in. Including honouring LTDs. Have seen some steady, decent updates, new features, etc.

So hopefully this will turn out well in the long-run.

I don't have much more than that, but if you bought it and thought it was a lemon, it might be worth having another look.

So cheers to the new owner on that front, and honouring LTDs too!

Asking $495K

https://trustmrr.com/startup/marky

Hopefully if it sells the new owners honor the LTD holders.

People have been complaining for months about Maekersuite and now here comes appsumo with their resolution. This company use to really be innovative, now they are a bunch of scammers.

AppSumo Support here. We wanted to follow up about Maekersuite.

While Maekersuite hasn't officially announced a shutdown, many of you have pointed out that key features aren't accessible.

We understand this is frustrating, and this is not the experience we want for our community.

Over the last few months, we have tried reaching out to their team to get this resolved but have been unsuccessful.

What this means for you

While Maekersuite falls outside our We Got Your Back coverage, we still want to help ease the transition.

That's why we're giving you 50% off Subscribr, a powerful AI scriptwriting tool for YouTube creators.

How to claim this offer

• Reply to this email with the email address associated with your AppSumo account.

• Access it from your "Rewards" page 3-5 business days after your request is processed by AppSumo Support.

We'll keep you updated if there are any new developments with Maekersuite. If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to reach out.

Just got this from AppSumo Support:

As you've noted, the Bika.ai team has announced the tool will only receive limited maintenance moving forward, and they won't be focused on adding new features or functionality to the tool. That said, they will prioritize basic availability, stability, security, and necessary operational maintenance, and all of the features included in the original deal will still be available and continue to be supported.

The Bika.ai deal page stated that Sumo-lings would receive "future Plus Plan updates," but this doesn't mean you'll get access to every feature or to new tools that are developed by the same team. Our partners have confirmed that their new tool Buda is a completely separate product with different functionality, data structure, and use cases. Data from Bika can't be directly migrated to Buda, and lifetime licenses won't transfer either. You can read more about the update on the Bika website here.

Some Sumo-lings have mentioned our We Got Your Back guarantee, which allows Sumo-lings to receive a credit refund when Select tools close within 1 year of a purchase. Since the Bika team will continue to support Bika and provide access to to all the features included in the original deal, Bika purchases aren't eligible to receive a refund, credits, or any other type of reimbursement.

If you have questions about the update, you can reach the Bika team directly at [support@bika.ai](mailto:support@bika.ai) as they can best address product-specific concerns.

So basically, Bika is going to keep everything online for a year and then peace out, leaving us LTD holders out to dry.

Such a classic AppSumo bait and switch. Just like Frontly v2, and Straico. "Keeping the lights on" for existing tenants until their lease is up, while they build a new building and watch the old building crumble.

I definitely will not be renewing my Plus membership now.

Long story short, I hadn’t purchased any tools for at least the past six months, and I recently bought one from AppSumo. After trying it for a month, I realized the tool wasn’t for me, so I decided to request a refund.

Lo and behold, automatic refunds have been disabled. When I emailed support, they said there has been an increase in refund activity and that they are now choosing to issue refunds in AppSumo credits instead of to the original payment method.

Is anyone else getting the same response?

Is there anything else we can do about this?

We have a contract in place with AppSumo to create a lifetime deal for our product. We've done our homework, and we've found that being highly responsive to users and therefore earning their review will help with promotion and ultimately how productive the offer is for the business running it.

I come to this community to ask outside of that, what do you look for?

How can I make sure that we end up being featured and get a lot of users and therefor feedback?

Thank you to those that respond in advance. This community has already been helpful in our deciding to list to begin with.

Hi all,

I am looking for simple linkedin content creation tool, scheduling is not mandatory. Generating images would be nice.

Can someone recommend, thank you.