Lifetime Deals

Hi 👋 I'm cnu and I'm a sucker for lifetime plans and deals. This would be my intro if there was a LTD anonymous.

I got introduced to LTDs via Appsumo in 2011 and initially I wasn't buying many. But in the recent 4-5 years, I have bought thousands of dollars worth of tools and LTDs. Some via Appsumo and some directly via the sites.

There have been many times when I have bought a deal and never used the software at all. And some times, the tool are shutdown after a few months of me buying it.

Whenever I see a new tool that I associate it with many of my unfinished (and unstarted) projects and I end up buying them. Sometimes it's for competition analysis. Sometimes it's a tool that will help me with building site or design graphics or editing audio/video, etc.

Even now I saw a habit formation SaaS app that has a subscription as well as a lifetime deal. Subscription costs $24/year vs $99 for lifetime. I would have to use the tool with the subscription model for 4+ years before the lifetime deal makes financial sense.

In fact, the tool is built by an indiehacker and most indiehacker projects die before it's first birthday. So it's risky to get the lifetime deal. But I would probably end up buying the lifetime deal.

Some might call this addiction, but I think it's more of a "Loss Aversion" bias. What if I bought the the subscription and years pass, the subscription cost keeps increasing? Why not lock in the price once and for all?

This has happened a couple of times, when I bought the LTD of a very good tool and it ended up becoming a success and I would've spent a lot of money on subscribing to the tool.

Rare? Yes, but is the tool worth the money? That's a decision I have to take and live with it.

PS: BTW, The habit tracking tool is called PolarHabits and it uses momentum instead of streaks to make sure you don't get demotivated in your habit tracking.