Select vs Radar: both sides of AppSumo, with numbers

I have run both kinds of AppSumo launch. In 2024 and 2025 my first product got the Select treatment: AppSumo's team promoted it, featured it, and pushed it through their list repeatedly across each campaign, at launch, in themed features, in closing-soon reminders, on a cadence they decide, not you. This month I listed my second product on Radar, the self-serve tier, where you fill in the listing yourself and nobody at AppSumo touches it.

Most founders only ever see one side of this. Having now seen both, the difference is bigger than I expected, and I have not seen anyone lay it out plainly. So here it is.

What Select actually did

Select means AppSumo sources the buyers. They put the deal in front of their list, their homepage, their campaigns. For that they take most of each sale. The exact split is negotiated per deal, but 70/30 in AppSumo's favor is the order of magnitude to have in your head.

For docAnalyzer, across two waves (2024 and 2025), that produced five figures in revenue. The listing collected 35 reviews, almost all positive, and 184 public questions from buyers. Both still work for us today: the reviews rank and convert, and the questions page is two years of pre-sales objections answered in public. It all carried into the second wave.

The part nobody tells you: the traffic is entirely theirs. When the campaign ends, it ends. You keep the customers, the reviews, and the follow-on relationship with the sumoling audience. You do not keep a channel.

What Radar actually is

Radar is the same store with none of the engine. You get a listing page, the review system, the refund and licensing infrastructure, and a 90% split on any buyer who comes through your own partner link. To be fair, Select deals come with an own-traffic link at around the same rate too (the exact terms vary by deal, do not treat it as guaranteed). The real difference is which rate your sales actually land on: in a Select campaign most buyers arrive through AppSumo's pushes at the negotiated split; on Radar there are no pushes, so every sale is one you brought, at the 90%. The catch is in the next paragraph.

What you do not get is buyers. Here are the numbers one week in: AppSumo itself sends my listing about ten visits a day, and none of them has converted. Not one sale from platform traffic. Meanwhile my first actual paying customer in that same week came from a tiny launch directory, paid full retail on my site, and as far as I can tell has no idea the AppSumo deal exists.

So the mental model that took me too long to reach: Select is a channel. Radar is a venue. A Radar listing is closer to a Gumroad page than to a launch: it converts traffic you bring, and brings almost none of its own.

One honest caveat on my own comparison: the two products are not equally easy to sell. docAnalyzer is a broad tool; nearly any sumoling could find a use for it. My second product only makes sense if you run a specific two-tool stack, so its addressable slice of the AppSumo audience is much smaller. Some of my zero is the niche, not the tier. But that cuts the other way too: a narrow product is exactly the case where you cannot count on browse traffic finding you, which makes the venue-not-channel point more true, not less.

Why I listed on Radar anyway

If Radar brings no traffic, why bother? Three reasons, and none of them is revenue.

First, reviews. AppSumo reviews are verified purchases on a domain buyers trust. There is no equivalent I can build on my own site. Every review a Radar buyer leaves is a public asset that keeps working.

Second, the deal infrastructure. Lifetime licensing, refunds, upgrades between tiers: AppSumo's machinery handles all of it. Building that myself for a short campaign would be a bad trade.

Third, the audience exists even if it does not browse. Deal buyers trust an AppSumo checkout more than a stranger's Stripe checkout. When I send my own traffic there, at a 90% split, I am renting trust, not distribution. Honest qualifier: this one matters less for me than for most. My company is three years old and a buyer can check the first product's track record, so my own checkout is not a stranger's. For a first product from an unknown founder, though, this is probably the strongest reason on the list.

That last point changed how I think about the 90%: it is not "AppSumo takes 10% of my sales." It is "10% buys me verified reviews and a checkout my buyers already trust." Priced that way, it is cheap.

Who should use which

If AppSumo offers you Select: it is a real channel with a real cost. You are trading most of your margin for buyers, reviews, and cash up front. For a bootstrapped product that needs all three, that trade can be right. It was for me, twice.

But one warning: stay firm in the negotiation. AppSumo's incentive is a deal so good nobody can refuse it; conversion is their metric, and the terms that maximize it are the terms that hurt you later. Because here is the asymmetry: the campaign ends, the commitment does not. Every lifetime license you sell is an open-ended obligation, and if your product consumes AI tokens, that obligation carries a real cost every month, forever. I suspect this asymmetry is a factor in why so many lifetime deals end up gutted or abandoned: the founder agreed to terms that only made sense while the campaign cash was flowing. Cap what a lifetime license grants per month, meter what costs you money per use, and treat "unlimited" as the most expensive word in the deal. We honored both of our waves in full, AI costs included, and that was only possible because we sold terms we could survive.

If you are self-serving on Radar: do not launch and wait. Nothing happens. Treat the listing as a landing page with a review system attached, and plan the traffic yourself: your list, your communities, your content. If you have no traffic plan, Radar will not save you; it will just quietly hold your listing while nothing happens.

I am one week in, and the real work starts now: bringing people. Happy to share follow-up numbers if there is interest. And if you have run a Radar listing where platform traffic actually converted, I would like to hear what category and price point, because I have not seen it yet.