I tried AppSumo: a great deal or a waste of time?

Remember my concern about AppSumo?

Well, I decided to give it a try. Is it worth it? Let me walk you through my experience.

For the context AppSumo is a digital marketplace that offers software deals and discounts primarily aimed at entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses. It allows companies to promote their products at a significantly reduced price, often between 75% to 99% off, in exchange for exposure to a huge user base. Buyers can access premium tools at a fraction of the cost, though the deals are typically time-limited.

Let’s back to my journey now. First, you need to fill out a questionnaire, after which an AppSumo representative contacts you to ask a few additional questions and ensure you fully understand their pricing policy: you will earn 40% on each commission (more if your SaaS is the first payment made by an App Sumo user). On a recommendation, I inflated the price of NextJSDirectory so I could sell my boilerplate at a reasonable price on AppSumo.

However, this turned out to be useless. As the AppSumo team explained, they display prices between 75% and 99% off, capping the prices at $59.

Once I filled out the form and confirmed my acceptance of the pricing, AppSumo took care of creating the listing for me, optimized based on their experience. Well, that's one less thing for me to do.

I then received a launch date: August, the 12th. However, the end date is unknown—the offer ends once there is a high refund rate or you make fewer than one sale per day.

On 08/12, I received an email notifying me of my first sale—yay, $23.60!

A few hours later, another sale came in—$22.24. Then a third sale: $21.24.

Do you notice something? The amount decreases.
Why ? I don't have the answer. Happy to know if someone knows, I didn’t take the time to contact support for a few cents.

It's nice to see sales rolling in without doing anything, but I'm earning much less than I would by selling just one NextJSDirectory boilerplate without AppSumo ($180 versus $22 average sale).

To give you an idea, I sold NextJSDirectory to 7 persons, that’s $156,76 in 2 weeks.

Additionally, I'm receiving more and more emails with questions like: "Hello, how do I install NextJSDirectory? It says it's easy, but all I got was a Zip file.".

Yes, I'm selling a boilerplate, so I sell code. It's easy for a developer who can simply follow the README file. However, for someone who doesn't know what GitHub is, it will indeed be challenging.

Some people left a bad review because of this. So, I contacted AppSumo to ask them to clarify that the product is a code, so users need to have a basic understanding of it.

And I helped someone who asked, to install it. I got one of the best review I ever had ♥️

I don’t know when the deal will be over, but this is the last change to get NextJSDirectory at a very low price here.

 
Conclusion: AppSumo reaches a wide audience, but be prepared to provide extra support.
AppSumo sells at low prices : are you ready for this?). And these customers are often the most difficult—they buy without much research as they are primarily looking for great deals.

Also, the launch happened during my vacation week—something to avoid if you're looking to relax, I had a few anxious moment with support 😅.