Nimble Industries

Is AppSumo worth it?

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We recently chatted with AppSumo about the possibility of offering StatusGator on their platform. AppSumo partners with SaaS tools to offer lifetime deals for a small one-time fee, most of which they keep. So the obvious question is: Is AppSumo worth it for creators?

For those that aren’t familiar with AppSumo, the kinds of products offered are usually SaaS tools, typically B2B but not always. They often charge 2 or 3 months of the standard service plan. But it’s a one time fee for access forever, not recurring. AppSumo keeps the majority of this revenue, passing a small slice back to the product creator. The creator gets a huge burst of traffic and some upfront revenue. AppSumo claims this can kickstart a company or act like a seed round of financing.

The first question in our minds is whether AppSumo’s target audience overlaps with our audience of mostly technical people: software engineers, technical founders, devops engineers, site readiness engineers, etc. Our second question was whether it was worth what we would be giving up in terms of revenue to obtain these customers. How can we possibly profit off a customer who only pays us less than one month’s typical revenue and whom we must service forever?

AppSumo Partner Experiences

So we set out to find the published experiences of other creators. From all these experiences could we determine: Is AppSumo worth it?

Conclusion

Perhaps understandably, there are not a lot of negative experiences publicly posted. The answer from reading all of these is yes: AppSumo is worth it! They bring a ton of customers, revenue, feedback, and offer knock-on effects that last long after the deal is over.

We’re still undecided on if we’re willing to partner with AppSumo. But the experiences of others here make us think that it would be worth the effort.

About the author

Colin Bartlett

Colin Bartlett is co-founder of Nimble Industries, creators of StatusGator, VimTricks, and many more. He has been building web applications, managing software development projects, and leading engineering teams for 22 years.

Nimble Industries