Last year I participated in a Lifetime Deal (LTD) promotion to offer Preceden to the AppSumo community. Maybe I’ll dive into my experience there in another post, but I wanted to share an interesting thing that’s happening now, a year after the deal ended.
AppSumo has a policy that says something like this: you have to treat AppSumo customers like your other customers. For example, if after the AppSumo deal ends, you launch a big new feature, you can’t give it to the rest of your customers for free, but try to charge the people who paid for the lifetime deal to get them on a subscription. And it makes sense too… the spirit of these LTDs is that the people who buy it will not be subject to a ton of upsells afterwards.
Where this gets interesting is that Preceden has a policy that requires non-subscribers to log in at least once a year to keep their account and timelines. I set this up a few years ago so that if you signed up for Preceden back in like 2012, used it for a day or two, that your account and timelines would not just sit around forever in Preceden’s database, potentially with sensitive information (imagine the timeline of a messy divorce, for example). More often that not, these users forgot they signed up and have data in Preceden, and are happy that Preceden removes their old account.
I actually asked about this specific policy while preparing for the AppSumo LTD, and they confirmed, it’s fine for it to apply to LTD purchasers.
But now, here we are, when purchasers are running into this policy: imagine you purchased a “lifetime deal” on AppSumo for Preceden, but haven’t logged in for at least a year. You’re not an active, paying subscriber, so you’re treated like other Preceden users that are subject to the “you need to log in at least once a year to keep your account active” policy. You get a 60-day notice saying your account will be deleted if you don’t log in.
Confused, you write into support:
hello at preceden
not sure what you are writing to me
I am pretty sure I had a longtime license via sumo
please check
And:
Hi there,
I have a lifetime plan, so what does the email below mean for that?
Thanks
And:
I got an email that “Your inactive Preceden account will be canceled soon.” Will you also deactivate Appsumo lifetime accounts?
I empathize with these people, but at the same time, I’m treating them like other Preceden users. And more importantly, I don’t think it’s good either to have to keep these accounts and their potentially sensitive data around… forever… whatever that means. If they never log in, should their accounts and timelines really still be around in the year 2040? 2060? While it is a “lifetime deal”, in practice that seems tricky and even bad to do, at least for a SaaS like Preceden.
Another benefit to this policy for these purchasers is that it reminds them they have a Preceden account. Many AppSumo purchasers (for the Preceden deal and others) buy optimistically, imagining some future use for the product. These emails can serve as a reminder that they purchased it, and maybe help nudge some back to the product to discover value that they might not have otherwise gotten.
I could except these AppSumo purchasers from the inactive user policy, but it doesn’t seem like a good move, for them or for me.
If anyone has any strong thoughts here, I’d be interested to hear.
Matt Mazur 
It seems entirely reasonable to subject these LTD-sourced accounts to the same policies. They didn’t pay for special treatment, they paid a special price.
Whether it wasn’t obvious enough that they’d be subject to the same rules (including the inactive account policy) as regular users can be debated–who’s responsible for effectively communicating that one does not get special treatment for LTDs? You? AppSumo? Both?
If AppSumo says you’re to treat LTD users like regular users, is it on them to convey to the public that they require that of the tools and services on offer?
What is the context of “lifetime” anyway? The lifetime of a person? An account? The company?
It feels like there’s room for ambiguity on AppSumo’s part when it comes to describing what a lifetime deal actually entails. They bill it as eternal access to a service, but make no mention that those services might have policies (like yours) that make said account not so eternal.
I checked my partnership agreement and it doesn’t seem to define “lifetime” other than this:
> Lifetime Updates: Customers will receive all future updates to the Business Plan. (Ex: If your team releases additional features under the above plan, all Sumo-lings will receive that feature for free.)
So the way I’m reading it, it’s lifetime updates specifically to Preceden’s old business plan.
Ultimately, I think it’s up to me to decide how I want to interpret the “lifetime” part of it and I could surely wiggle my way out of it if I wanted to. I do want to do right by the LTD purchasers, but in a way that’s ideally not burdensome.