About SAASTOOLY
What this site is
SAASTOOLY is a directory of software lifetime deals — one-time purchases that replace monthly subscriptions — with a blog explaining when they are worth buying and when they are not.
We list 500+ deals across marketing and sales, development and IT, media tools, operations, and no-code builders. The directory is free, requires no account, and always will be.
The short version of our position: lifetime deals are one of the highest-return purchases available to a small business, and also one of the easiest ways to waste money. Which of those you experience depends almost entirely on how you buy. Most of what we publish is about that difference.
What we think about lifetime deals
So you know the perspective behind every recommendation on this site:
They work when the tool cancels a bill you already pay. Divide the one-time price by the monthly cost it eliminates. Under six months of payback is excellent — at that speed, even a vendor shutting down two years later leaves you well ahead.
They fail when you buy for a workflow that has not started. This is where most lifetime deal money is actually lost, and it has nothing to do with vendors going out of business. The tool you regret is rarely the one that turned out badly. It is the one you never opened.
"Lifetime" means the life of the product, not yours. If the vendor shuts down, access ends. A meaningful share of lifetime deal companies do not survive long term. That is manageable, but only if you price it in.
Some things should stay on subscriptions. Your CRM, your accounting, your billing. The savings are not worth the migration risk.
The longer versions: what a SaaS lifetime deal is, lifetime deal vs subscription, and the pros and cons with actual numbers.
How deals get listed
We want to be precise here, because a lot of sites in this space make claims they cannot support.
What we actually do:
- We source deals from AppSumo and, occasionally, private deals offered directly by a software company.
- We read the deal terms — refund window, stacking rules, tier limits, and what happens to future updates. These are where the surprises live, and most of them are not in the pricing table.
- We read the reviews, starting with the worst ones. One-star and three-star reviews tell you more about a tool's real limits than any feature list. Three-star reviews are usually the most informative: detailed enough to be useful, not angry enough to be noise.
- We read the founder's answers to hostile questions in the deal Q&A. How a founder handles public criticism during their own launch is the cheapest reliable signal about whether they will still be operating in three years.
- We check whether the product existed before the deal. A year of public changelog is a fundamentally different bet from a launch-week product.
- We categorise honestly. A tool that does one thing well is listed as a tool that does one thing well, not as an all-in-one platform.
What we do not do:
- We do not install and test every tool. With 500+ listings that would not be true, and sites claiming otherwise are not telling you the truth either.
- We do not audit anyone's security, compliance, or data protection. We are not qualified to, and no directory is. If a tool will hold sensitive data, that assessment is yours to make.
- We do not accept payment for placement. No vendor has paid us to be listed, ranked higher, or covered favourably.
- We do not remove negative coverage on request.
When we have used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. When we have not, we describe what the deal offers rather than pretending to a verdict we have not earned.
How we make money
Plainly, because you should be able to weigh it.
We earn affiliate commissions. When you buy through some of our links, the seller pays us a percentage. It costs you nothing extra — the price is identical whether you use our link or go direct.
Our main affiliate relationship is with AppSumo. We are an AppSumo affiliate partner, and most of the deals we list are sold there.
We also earn from some software companies directly, where a tool runs its own affiliate programme. These are disclosed the same way.
Not every link is an affiliate link. Links to articles, documentation, and tools we mention for context usually are not.
Every page with affiliate links carries a disclosure at the top. If you ever find one that does not, that is a mistake — tell us and we will fix it.
What commissions do not buy
The disclosure above is meaningless without this part, so here is how you can check it against what we actually publish.
We publish advice that costs us money. Our guide to which categories suit lifetime deals names three categories where we think you should pay for a subscription instead. Our AppSumo Plus review tells most readers not to buy it. Our 10-point checklist exists to stop purchases, which is the opposite of what an affiliate site is supposed to want.
That is deliberate. A site that recommends everything is worth nothing, and a reader who buys a tool they never open does not come back.
We do not rank deals by commission. Category pages and roundups are ordered by fit, not by what pays best.
We tell you when the answer is "do not buy." Including when a subscription is the better choice, which earns us nothing at all.
If you ever read something here that seems to contradict this, we would rather hear about it than not.
Accuracy and corrections
Deals change constantly. Prices move, tiers get restructured, refund terms are revised, and companies shut down.
We refresh our main guides roughly every 90 days and show a "last updated" date on each one. Between passes, some pages will be out of date.
Deal terms on the listing always overrule us. Refund windows and stacking rules are set per product by the vendor. We report them as accurately as we can, but the Deal Terms box on the listing is the only authoritative source — read it before you pay.
We correct rather than quietly delete. If we get something wrong and it matters, we fix it and note what changed.
If a tool we recommended has shut down, we want to know. That is more useful to the next reader than anything else on the page.
Start here
New to lifetime deals? → What is a SaaS lifetime deal
Wondering whether AppSumo is trustworthy? → Is AppSumo legit?
About to buy something? → The 10-point due diligence checklist or the free Lifetime Deal Scorecard
Just want to browse? → All lifetime deals · Deals ending soon
Contact
Email: support@saastooly.com
- Found an error, a dead tool, or a missing disclosure? Email us. Corrections are the fastest way to improve the site and we treat them as a priority.
- Vendors: we do not accept paid placement, but if you have a deal you think fits, use the same address.
SAASTOOLY is an independent affiliate site. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by any software vendor listed here, beyond the affiliate relationships described above.