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?
- LeadsBridge used AppSumo to raise their profile. They had a well-liked product at the time of their AppSumo launch, but had struggled to expand their audience, which AppSumo solved.
- BotLetter made $178k in two weeks but now their site is gone, the original Medium post is gone, and I’m not sure what’s up with that. I suspect the amount is before AppSumo takes their 70% cut.
- Customer Labs reports a positive experience with good details about how they did it. No hard numbers but $35k to $60k in two weeks is floated.
- PixelMe reports $53k in two weeks. They detail the launch process which includes a short “soft launch” period.
- HeySummit says they got 4x what they thought but provides few other details about the process.
- Lemlist made $48k in two weeks and detailed their traffic and metrics.
- Clickminded generated $21k in 8 days during their AppSumo launch in 2012. They claim AppSumo had an audience of 730k people at the time.
- Infinity earned $70k in 10 days with AppSumo and blogged extensively about their experience. Notably, they now offer their own lifetime deal directly on their site.
- BotStar claims $500k from AppSumo in a month but that is very clearly before AppSumo takes their 70% cut. Their write-up includes details of how they prepared.
- SerpStat made $250k in a week but does not specify if that’s before or after AppSumo cut. They wrote up their entire process from negotiation through launch.
- Project.co made $28k in 3 weeks and details a lot of numbers about their experience including refund rates and post-launch effects.
- MalCare recorded $200k before AppSumo fees and detailed the steps they took leading up to launch.
- Krisp launched on AppSumo with total sales of $215k. They mention the brand exposure as the biggest upside. We love Krisp, by the way. Would we ever have found it had they not blown up via AppSumo?
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.
