Should I offer a lifetime deal for my app?

What you get

• Cash now. Useful if it pays for the next few months of building.
• Many users quickly, and with them bug reports and feature requests.
• A test of the pitch. People paying anything, even once, is a stronger signal than signups.

What it costs you

• Future revenue. A customer who would have paid monthly for years pays once. Every month after that, they cost you support and hosting and bring in nothing.
• Running costs that never stop. If each user costs you something every month (AI tokens, storage, sending email), the deal loses money a little more each month.
• The wrong crowd. Deal buyers often buy many tools and use few. Their feature requests pull the product toward what deal buyers want, not what your paying users need.
• A muddied picture. Lifetime customers inflate your user count and hide your real churn and monthly revenue.

When it can make sense

• Your costs per user are close to zero.
• You need the cash to keep going, and a subscription launch would take longer to get there.
• The people buying are genuinely your target users.

How to limit the damage

• Cap it. A fixed number of seats, then it closes for good.
• Define lifetime. Lifetime access to today’s plan and its limits, not to every future feature or unlimited usage.
• Keep usage limits. A monthly cap on the expensive part (AI calls, emails) protects you if a few buyers use it heavily.
• Track them apart. Tag lifetime customers so your monthly revenue, churn and customer-value numbers reflect subscribers only.

A worked example

Say a subscriber pays $20 a month and stays 10 months on average: about $200 over their time with you. A $99 lifetime deal brings in less than half of that from someone who might have subscribed, and keeps costing you for as long as they use it. Unless the lifetime buyers are mostly people who never would have subscribed, the deal lowers what each customer is worth.

With Nordva Launch

With Stripe connected (read-only, every plan), Launch shows MRR, new and cancelled subscriptions and where paying customers came from. MRR comes from subscriptions only, so a lifetime deal sold as a one-time payment doesn’t inflate it.