The lifetime browser I bought died, so I listed mine on the same shelf

Lifetime deals came back over the last few years.

Plenty of people are tired of watching subscriptions stack up, and on a site like AppSumo you can find tools that would otherwise cost a few hundred dollars a year sitting there for one payment. I've bought a lot of them.

It's a good feeling for the buyer. There's just one thing you can't check before you pay.

The only thing guaranteeing "lifetime" is that the person who made it is still around tomorrow.

Sixteen months

In April 2024 I bought a lifetime deal for a browser called Sidekick. The listed value was $499, the deal price that day was $49, and after the member discount I paid $44.10.

It let me keep a separate window per service, so I put every work account I had into it.

In December of the same year, the shutdown notice went out. The growth they had hoped for hadn't come, and the business couldn't continue.

Buyers were refunded in full, in AppSumo credits. That sat outside the normal guarantee window and was handled as a special case, which I think was the decent thing to do.

What I had afterwards was credit, though. Not a browser. Everything I'd set up went with it.

Nothing replaced it

I tried more than ten alternatives.

Each one got close and then missed. What I needed was full separation per work account, with a real Mac terminal sitting right next to it, and nothing had both.

So I built it. SpaceDeck, a browser for macOS.

That part of the story is ordinary. The interesting part came next.

I'd bought 260 of these

Some context on where I'm standing.

I've bought more than 260 products on AppSumo. For about nine years I bought nearly every lifetime deal that looked useful, and Sidekick was one of them.

Buy that many and you start to see the patterns. How the pricing works, which listings are going to be gone in a year. Seeing it never meant I could build any of it, though.

That changed over the past year or so.

Vibe coding got good enough to use for real work, and most of what sits on that shelf moved into the range where building it is faster than buying it. The replacement browser is proof of that: I looked for one for months and then wrote it.

Once that's true, buying the next deal stops being interesting. Selling one starts to.

Going back as a seller

I decided to list it on the same marketplace where I'd lost money.

The buyers are there, for one thing. Everyone who bought that Sidekick deal is holding credit and no browser, and the thing they're looking for is the thing I built for myself.

And 260 purchases turn out to be worth something on this side of the table. I've watched which listings sell and which ones die on that shelf for nine years. I didn't expect that to be an asset until I was the one writing the listing.

Once I started the submission, two things showed up that I couldn't see from outside.

One. Your payout changes by a factor of 3.6

AppSumo's cut depends on who brought the customer.

How it sold	What I keep
Through my own deal link	90%
Sold by AppSumo	25%, rising to 30, 40 and 50 as revenue stacks up

There's no threshold on that 90%. It applies from the first sale.

On a $45 product, a customer I bring is $40.50 to me. One that AppSumo brings is $11.25. Same sale, 3.6 times the difference.

Once you know that, you use the platform differently.

AppSumo isn't where you find customers. It's where you borrow payment and trust.

The thing that scares people about buying software outright from one developer is that nobody refunds them if the developer disappears. On that shelf, AppSumo carries that risk. I know, because it's what happened to me.

So the right move is to send people there yourself, through your own link. They buy with confidence, and you keep nine tenths of it.

Two. "The next major version costs extra" doesn't survive contact with the terms

Sell something outright and you usually leave yourself an exit.

"The version you're buying is yours forever. The next major release is a paid upgrade."

That was my plan too, and it's how the lifetime tier on my own site is sold.

Then I read the partner terms. If you list a substantially similar product again within 24 months, you're required to give the earlier buyers terms that are equal or better. AppSumo decides whether you did.

So writing "2.x only" and then shipping a paid 3.0 eighteen months later doesn't work. Putting a condition in writing that you can't hold is worse than not having it.

The AppSumo tier includes every future update. It's a different deal from my own site, but I'd rather that than a surprise later.

What the buyer actually wants to know

The submission has a founder's message, separate from the product description. It sits just above the reviews, which means people read it right before deciding.

Don't put features there. The features are already above it.

At that exact spot, someone buying a lifetime deal wants one thing answered.

Will you still be here in three years?

I'd been on the receiving end of that question going wrong, so I knew what to write.

I bought a lifetime deal myself and watched it close. I've run one company alone since 2004 and still do. The main business is a freelance marketplace in Japan with around 300,000 members, which I've maintained on my own for 22 years. And I use this browser every day myself, so it gets maintained whether or not anybody else buys it.

That last line is the real answer. "I'll maintain it as long as it sells" isn't a promise. "I'll maintain it because I use it" holds even at zero revenue.

Price

AppSumo's own guidance is that a code under $49 clears review more easily, and you can raise it after launch.

I counted 59 lifetime listings in the Radar section. The median was $59, with a range of $19 to $179.

I went with $45, and left the $129 lifetime tier on my own site exactly where it was. Dropping it would punish the people who came directly, and it would flatten the discount on the deal at the same time.

Where it stands

I submitted on 16 September 2026. Review takes up to one business week.

Whether it sells is still ahead of me, so there's no result to report yet.

What I can say is that the payout structure and the re-entry clause are both worth knowing before you submit rather than after. The first one alone moves your take by 3.6x.

I wrote up the redemption side, the part you have to build yourself, separately.

The product is here.

https://spacedeck.app