
Show HN: Lifetime SaaS Deals (tired of paying monthly for biz tools?) - Bjarnee
https://vumiu.com/dashboard/
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jv22222
IMHO - On the signup popup form. If you want to close it without entering an
email address you have to click a link that says - "No thanks, I hate saving
money" \- it seems to go against the friendliness of the rest of the branding.

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Bjarnee
I agree. I suck at marketing, so had someone come up with that, but I actually
hate it myself, so will try to think of something else. I genuinely want to
build something useful that will bring people to the site because it helps
them rather that annoy them!

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jv22222
How about "No thanks, maybe later" or something like that :)

Even "No thanks" is fine!

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ivanhoe
IMHO forcing visitors to be "polite" to a site is just as sneaky as using "I
hate saving money". It's all meant to make a visitor feel guilty about
clicking it. Just add a simple old close button and don't play marketing mind-
games with your users, please.

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Bjarnee
I agree, I will toss out the marketing book that recommended that, and try
being human instead!

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jedberg
As someone who runs a SaaS business, lifetime subscriptions seem like the
worst idea ever. I can't imagine it gets you that many more people who
wouldn't buy otherwise, vs the incredible risk you take that you've correctly
predicted the cost of providing your service _forever_.

That being said, this is a super helpful list!

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Bjarnee
Yes, there surely are many pitfalls, both for customers and companies. I think
it is important for the company not to overpromise in cases like this. But I
guess one of the main reasons companies do lifetime deals, is to get initial
traction, and fastet build a very dedicated group of beta users. If they
handle that correctly, it can be a big asset, and cheaper than many other
forms of startup marketing.

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deanclatworthy
This is a pretty useful list. In some cases I actively avoid businesses with
this model as I do not believe the business model is sustainable. But it
really depends. If i'm buying FTP software (e.g. transmit) then fine. But if
i'm buying a VPN, no chance.

I would suggest moving the source column on the table. At first I found it
hard to read as the primary data I'm looking for is the service, not the
source.

Also, remove your obnoxious newsletter popup, especially with the "No thanks,
i hate to save money" dismiss...

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SallySwanSmith
That "No Thanks, I hate to save money" is a classic dark pattern designed to
manipulate people. There's tons of articles about how damaging they are to
users perceptions of the interactions (Example
[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/shaming-
users/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/shaming-users/) ). I honestly closed
the browser and didn't give the content any look due to it, as if you're going
to try to shame me into giving you my email address, you're not going to play
fair with anything else.

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Bjarnee
Thank you for your opinion. I agree, and will rephrase it later today. I have
tried to be very forthcoming about what the site is about, sticking my
affiliate link disclaimer on top of every page, so I sincerely do not want to
have a popup that makes people vomit!

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dylz
This is an affiliate link farm with obnoxious shaming dark patterns...

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Bjarnee
Yes, I agree the popup was annoying. I used a template I found, and understand
it was annoying, stupid, disrespectful etc. I have now removed it. It is
clearly stated on top of every page that there are affiliate links on the
site. I spend 20+ hours weekly finding deals and updating the deal list. If it
turns out the world hates this, I can stop doing it, close the site down, and
do something else with my time. It seemed however some people found it useful,
so I thought why not see if people found it useful.

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dylz
I'd also be interested in why some of your external scripts are (very badly
and slowly) trying to fingerprint the browser and do persistent tracking. Your
aiva thing is triggering "site is attempting to load adobe flash" notice bars.

It also tries to spin up the GPU, ruining battery life.

I am curious if you've actually tried all of these, or if you're just going
with whatever offers affiliate money, because a decent number are either
pretty much ad-packed open source projects being sold with a windows GUI/the
type of stuff you see on clickbank with a landing page that looks like
spam/actual garbage/run by criminals.

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Bjarnee
I am not a programmer, so I tried to find a tool for email signups, and Aiva
looked nice at the time. Guessing from your reply, it is bad in some way, so I
have turned it off. I do not need it. As for the rest of your question, I have
made it clearer in the text on the deal dashboard. I borrowed your text, hope
you don't mind.

My main idea is to find every single deal online that is labeled lifetime
deal, and share it in a simple, searchable, sortable overview list. The list
will contain my affiliate links, so I can hopefully some day earn more money
from the site than I spend. If you have other suggestions to how to label
things so people do not get fooled, let me know. If you think the best thing
is to delete the site from existance, then I will actually think about doing
so. I had a hope it was possible to show a list of links online, be they
affiliate links, in some way so that it could still be useful. But maybe it is
not.

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dylz
Personally, my belief is that a completely unvetted, uncurated list of links
is not very useful. Maybe others may differ.

It would be more work but I would much rather look at a list of curated
services that are also affiliate links that tell me why they are good and
maybe a pros/cons/alternative-to-x table. If I am looking for a completely
uncurated list I could go to stacksocial and search for the word lifetime. A
short 1-2 sentences would at least tide me over as to what the product does.

It is less about the fooled, but more that quite a lot of that list is garbage
software, the kind you see included in adware installers as trials - like the
PDF converters, the lying VPN providers that won't actually last a lifetime,
I'm trying to find a list of deals that specifically removes these.

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Bjarnee
I guess it comes down to a difference it what people look for. When I set
about creating this site, it was because I like getting these deals and try
out new software myself, but I found myself missing some of the best deals. So
I set up alerts, signed up for lots of fb groups, and checked lots of sites,
but it took a lot of time, and suddenly I hade made myself a dashboard. As it
is right now, the site does what I personally like, it shows a list of ongoing
lifetime deals from any source I can find, and one can get the same info in
email alerts or rss subscribtion. Personally I hate comparison tables, because
how can I know the person who made them has tested all tools compared and know
them well enough to make a fair comparison. So I actually thought it more fair
to just post the links. But these comments have given me some food for
thought, so I think I need to make things clearer in writing on each page.

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dylz
Don't let me get you down. After all, look at what HN users said about Dropbox
when it launched :)

As a dev I am sick of marketing bullshit and believe none of it, prefer spec
sheets and seeing the code myself, competent engineer support, when I see a
newsletter popup I immediately exit, when I see adblock telling me it's
blocking a hundred things and also seeing stuff trying to run flash my first
thought is malware. When I see "unlimited backup storage for life" my first
thought is that bandwidth and power and cooling is a recurring cost and that
unlimited doesn't exist.

I would assume a "normal user" would convert better to newsletter things
(otherwise why would they keep getting used), social media liking and group
chat (I block all like buttons, follow buttons, etc.), click through happily
and upload 3 GB to their "unlimited backup" plan..

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Bjarnee
Thanks for the great suggestions, I will try to implement some improvements
this week. If nobody cares about the first column, I can at least move it to
the far right As for the business model, I have gotten some great tools from
startups that are trying to get off the ground, but of course there are also
some tools that never seem to get anywhere after initial rounds. It's a good
idea to ask the founders for roadmaps, company details etc.

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jarym
I remember when Quip were on Appsumo and I went for it but couldn’t understand
why they were doing lifetime deals. Then several months later Salesforce came
along with a $300m acquisition and it all made sense - user base.

That said I will generally avoid ‘award winning’ software I’ve never heard of
(after buying one Appsumo product I realised the software was a dud) and I
also avoid any critical services (lifetime 10Tb cloud backup for $5... no way)

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eps
* “SUBSRIBE TO OUR JUNK MAIL”

* Thanks, but I hate saving money

Got this full-screen popup with no close button not 5 seconds in. This is not
acceptable. It’s obnoxious and disrespectful.

Flagged the whole thing.

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Bjarnee
Thank you for your opinion. I have removed the popup, as my intention is not
to annoy people, belive it or not.

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eps
Appreciate you listening. I rescinded the flag.

