Every verdict on this site comes from the same process. This page describes it exactly, including what we do not do, because a method you can check is worth more than a claim you can’t.
What we verify on every deal
1. The AppSumo listing, screenshotted on the day. We open the product page, record the Tier 1 price, the full tier structure, the rating, the review count and the deal status, and we screenshot it. That screenshot appears in the review with the capture date on it. If the listing changes, our screenshot shows what it said when we wrote.
2. The vendor’s own current pricing. This is the step almost nobody takes, and it is where most of our disagreements with the marketing come from. We open the vendor’s pricing page and record what they actually charge today. AppSumo’s struck-through “regular price” is a marketing figure, and it is frequently not the price a real customer would pay.
Two examples from our current reviews. AppSumo lists Screpy’s regular price as $204; Screpy’s own pricing page sells the comparable annual plan for $77. AppSumo shows BerqWP at “$39, was $48” — a 19% discount — while the vendor sells the same plan at a permanent $4/month early-adopter rate, which makes the lifetime deal a roughly ten-month payback rather than a bargain.
3. The tier limits against the paid plan. A lifetime deal is often a smaller product than the subscription it appears to replace. ClickRank’s Tier 1 crawls 500 pages; the $59/month Solo plan crawls 2,000. SnowSEO’s Tier 1 includes 500 AI credits a month against Starter’s 3,000. We check this every time and say so, because “80% off” means nothing if the tier is 25% of the product.
4. The published evidence base. We read the AppSumo review text and record what buyers actually complain about, and we weigh the review count, not just the star rating. A 4.00★ average across five reviews is weaker evidence than 4.62★ across nine hundred. Where a product has too few reviews to draw a conclusion from, we say the evidence base is insufficient rather than filling the gap with adjectives.
5. Arithmetic, shown. Break-even is the lifetime price divided by the real monthly cost of the closest equivalent plan. We show the division and state the assumptions. Where the vendor publishes no price we can verify, we do not invent one — we say the figure is unverified and use a different measure, such as cost per site or cost per article, built only from numbers we can attribute.
What we do not do
We do not claim hands-on testing we have not done. Our current reviews are verification and analysis of price, tier structure, vendor claims and published buyer feedback. They are not accounts of us running each tool for weeks. When a review is based on extended personal use, it will say so explicitly and show original screenshots from inside the product. Until then, we describe what we verified and where the information came from.
We would rather tell you the review is a pricing and evidence analysis than pretend to an experience we didn’t have. Most sites in this niche claim to have tested everything. Ask yourself how one person tests two hundred products.
We do not take payment for a verdict. No vendor has paid for placement, a score, or a position in a shortlist, and none will. If that ever changes, this page changes first and the affected pages carry a label.
We do not publish a rating we cannot stand behind. One product we looked at, GrackerAI, shows 1.80★ across five reviews in AppSumo’s structured data while the visible page says “no reviews yet.” We couldn’t resolve the contradiction, so we left the product out of our shortlists rather than publish either number.
How the verdict is decided
Buy — the arithmetic works against the vendor’s real price, the tier you’d actually buy is not crippled relative to the paid plan, and the published evidence base is large enough to mean something.
Consider — the deal is defensible but conditional. Either the payback is slow, or the tier is materially smaller than the subscription, or the tool carries a risk we think you should weigh, or the evidence base is thin. The review names the condition.
Skip — the arithmetic doesn’t work, or the product has a specific defect that matters to our readers, or there isn’t enough evidence to justify spending money. We name the reader for whom it might still make sense, then explain why that isn’t most people.
We publish Skip verdicts. Two of our first fifteen reviews are Skips. We earn nothing on them, which is the point.
Corrections and re-verification
Deals rotate weekly and prices change. Every review carries a “last verified” date. We re-check live deals and update that date, and when a deal ends we mark the review rather than leaving a dead price online.
If you find something wrong — a price that has moved, a tier that changed, a claim that doesn’t hold — tell us and we will fix it and note the correction. See our editorial policy for how corrections are handled, and our affiliate disclosure for how the site is funded.