Any insights the economics of life time deals?

I wrote about this in ZeroToFounder

LTD stands for Life Time Deals. Selling your product for a fixed price, and the user can use it lifetime (lifetime of the company). The prices for SaaS LTDs stay around $49 to $149 based on the product type and deal terms.

Some of the platforms that bring LTDs are AppSumo, PitchGround, etc. Also, note that many Facebook groups help launch LTDs for you for their followers, and some of these Facebook groups have more than 100K followers. So, overall it can drive some good revenue for you if your product solves a good problem that the audience is interested in.

But the only catch here is - Most of these platforms charge 70% of the sales and give you only 30% of the revenue. Let’s say you make $100K sales, you get only $30K. It's still a good deal as these platforms do the heavy lifting for you, and you get some early users for your product.

But there are some disadvantages also with this approach.

• If your product is still not mature, you will see people reporting all over the place, which may damage your product sales later.
• You will see a heavy influx of sales during the LTD promotion time, and if you have no support staff, this might get too overwhelming with a lot of time going into support and answering queries.
• If you ever need to sell your company, the LTD userbase could still be a liability as there is no new revenue coming from this userbase.

The plus side of LTDs:

• You can grow an early userbase
• You get a lot of feedback from early users
• You get traction (assuming the product/feedback is good)
• You get some money that you can reinvest back into the product

If you are wondering if you cannot give your product for a Life Time Access, just note that in most cases, 70% of the users who buy LTDs would actually never use it. That's the type of audience who buy LTDs. But again, this is only an observation from usual LTD discussions.