4 years into an AppSumo lifetime deal: the unvarnished math (and a question I'm stuck on).

Most LTD retrospectives are either victory laps from month 6 or rage posts from founders who got buried. Here's the boring middle: year 4, with a real dilemma at the end I'd love advice on.

Quick context. I run Produktly solo. All-in-one user onboarding tool (tours, checklists, NPS, surveys, roadmaps, changelogs). Competes with Userpilot, Pendo, Appcues etc. all that charge hundreds of dollars a month even on the cheapest plan. Produtkly starts at $19/mo.

The numbers:

Total AppSumo revenue, all-time: ~$90k
Current MRR from non-LTD subs: ~$1k
Team: just me

Why I even listed on AppSumo

Honestly, the initial reason I signed up was that AppSumo was paying $1,000 just to list a product. This felt like a crazy good deal at the time. I was early, broke, and that bonus alone was enough. I had basically zero expectations about whether anything would sell.

Then sales started trickling in. Best months hit multiple thousands of dollars. It's fluctuated a lot since, and lately it's been slowing.

The LTD reality (year 4 edition)

Things I didn't think about going in but learned the hard way:

A lot of LTDs never log in past month 1. [FILL IN your rough %.] They bought because the deal looked good. They forgot.
Active ones almost never upgrade. People who buy lifetime deals are deal hunters by identity. Asking them to start a $19/mo subscription violates
the reason they bought from you.
Support load never ends. Every active LTD customer is permanently a support customer at $0 ARPU.
AppSumo traffic isn't your traffic. Reviews, listings, discovery all live on their site. Between campaigns, the traffic goes cold.

Why LTDs don't upgrade

It's not that the upgrade is too expensive. It's that LTD customers picked you specifically because you weren't a recurring expense. You're in a different mental bucket than the SaaS subs on their card. Moving buckets feels like a betrayal of the original deal, even when the new plan technically covers different limits.

What helped me: accepting that LTDs are a different segment now. Referrals, reviews, case studies. Not a conversion pipeline.

What the deal actually gave me

It funded real runway when I had none. It surfaced every bug and edge case faster than any beta would have. It built social proof I'm still cashing in on. The AppSumo listing itself ranks for branded searches, and the reviews and Q&A on it do real persuasion work that I couldn't have manufactured myself. Got me real users when "real users" felt impossibly far away.

The dilemma I haven't figured out

Here's the part I'd actually love input on.

AppSumo is still bringing in money. Less than before, fluctuating, but real revenue. The question I keep going back and forth on: is it still my best marketing channel, or is it cannibalizing paying subscribers I'd otherwise convert at $19/mo?

Hard to tell. The kind of person who buys an LTD might never have signed up for a subscription anyway. Or they would have, and the deal's existence is quietly undermining my paid pricing every time it runs.

I'm afraid to kill a channel that still works while I haven't proven a replacement. But I also wonder if keeping it on is the reason I haven't been forced to build one.

Would I do it again?

Yeah, probably. I wouldn't change much, except two things:

Be explicit with myself about what the deal is for. Cash flow? Validation? Distribution? I treated it as "sure, why not" and never picked one. Different goals would have meant different deal terms.
Plan the exit before the entry. What's the trigger that ends it? What replaces it as a channel? I never thought about that, and now I'm stuck in a weird middle where I'm scared to turn off the tap.

Two questions for the IH crowd:

If you've run an LTD for years, did you ever fully end it? What was the trigger, and what happened to revenue and growth afterward?
Has anyone actually measured whether their LTD was net cannibalizing paid signups vs. net adding revenue? How would you even isolate that cleanly?