Lifetime deal? Price it so it pays.

The pros: cash up front, a crowd of early supporters who'll tell you what's missing, and, on a deal marketplace, buyers you'd never have reached. The cons: some buyers would have paid you every month instead, everyone still using it costs you support and upkeep with no end date, a marketplace keeps most of the sale, and a public deal can teach people to wait for the next one. Freemius's guide to lifetime deals puts it simply: run one for short-term cash toward a specific milestone, not to fix slow growth or churn.

Start from what a subscriber is worth to you, not from a multiple of your monthly price. A subscriber pays your monthly price for as long as they stay, which on average is one month divided by your monthly churn rate: 20 months at 5% churn. The deal has to cover the share of that you lose from buyers who'd have subscribed anyway, plus the cost of serving every buyer for as long as they're active. The more of your buyers would have paid monthly, the closer the deal has to be to a full subscriber's value.

A multiple of your annual price is a starting point, not an answer: one founder quoted by Freemius modelled a deal at roughly 2–3x a year's revenue per customer. What makes a multiple safe or not is your churn. Take a $20 monthly price, 5% monthly churn, $1 a month to serve an active member, half of lifetime buyers still active after three months and a fifth staying active for good, measured over ten years, so 2–3x a year is $480–$720. At 5% monthly churn, even if every buyer would have subscribed, the deal breaks even at $407, so any multiple in that range pays. At 1% churn, members stay for years: if half the buyers would have subscribed, the floor is $693, and if all of them would have, it's $1,359, 5.7 years of subscription, before counting anything past the ten years. The lower your churn, the more a lifetime deal gives away.

They can be, but the price has to carry the marketplace's cut. One vendor wrote that AppSumo keeps about 70% of lifetime deal revenue: their 2,622 sales came to $138,000, of which their share was about $46,000. Keeping 30 cents of each dollar means the deal price has to be about three and a third times whatever it needs to cover. Take a $20 monthly price, 5% monthly churn, $1 a month to serve an active member, half of lifetime buyers still active after three months and a fifth staying active for good, measured over ten years. If none of the buyers would have subscribed, the deal breaks even at $27 on your own site and $90 on a marketplace. If a fifth would have, the marketplace floor rises to $343. What can make a marketplace work is that its buyers are mostly strangers, so far fewer of them would ever have subscribed. Refunds on AppSumo average around 17%, so count deals after refunds.

They can. One company quoted by Freemius found its lifetime buyers were under 10% of its active customers but drove 18–20% of support volume, and that 45–50% of them were still actively using the product 90 days after buying. Lifetime members never cancel, but most stop showing up, and a core keeps using it for years. That core is who you keep serving for free, so the calculator counts the cost of each active member for as long as they're active.

Fewer than you think, and a fixed number. One founder's rule of thumb, quoted by Freemius, is to cap a lifetime deal under 10% of your members or revenue, and to close it on a set date or after a set number of sales, whichever comes first. With 500 paying members, that's at most 55 deals. A capped, time-limited deal raises cash and rewards early supporters without turning a big share of your membership into members who never pay again.

It depends on what you keep paying for. A self-paced course costs next to nothing per member to keep running, so the price mostly has to cover the subscriptions it replaces. A community with live calls, moderation or new content costs you every month someone stays active. Take a $20 monthly price, 5% monthly churn, $1 a month to serve an active member, half of lifetime buyers still active after three months and a fifth staying active for good, measured over ten years, with one in five buyers who'd have subscribed anyway. At $0 a month to serve, like a finished course, the deal breaks even at $80. At $3 a month, like an active community, it's $149. Either way, sell lifetime access to what exists today and keep new courses and live calls for subscribers. Or make the deal turn into a subscription after a few years: Freemius's guide suggests three to five.

Both bring cash in on day one. An annual plan does it without giving anything away for good: members pay again next year or leave, and what you give up is capped at the discount. A lifetime deal trades every future payment for one, so it costs you more the longer a buyer would have stayed. If you need cash and already have members who'd pay monthly, an annual plan is usually the safer way to get it, and Memberstack's free annual plan simulator shows the biggest discount that still pays.