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customer six offered 400 for lifetime access to my 19/mo tool - take it?
Six paying customers, 114 a month in total, tool is 19 a month. One of them emailed asking if I would do 400 for lifetime access. He says he hates subscriptions and would rather pay once and forget it.
400 is more than three months of my entire MRR and would cover a year of hosting. But the product is nine months old and I genuinely do not know whether I will still be running it in three years, which makes the word lifetime feel like something I should not be selling.
So: is one lifetime deal at this stage a mistake or fine as a one-off? What do you write down so lifetime has an actual definition? And does it poison the pricing page for everyone else?
@sheetsmith · 4mo ago · 2 replies
Sold a batch of these two products ago and the money was the least interesting part. The people who buy lifetime tend to be your heaviest users and your most demanding tickets. They have paid, they are never paying again, and the relationship has no checkpoint where either side can walk away without it being a thing.
One deal with one customer you already like is not the same animal as a public lifetime tier. If you do it, do it privately and keep it off the pricing page. And offer the boring alternative first: two years prepaid at a modest discount. Half the people who say they hate subscriptions mean they hate being charged without noticing, and prepay fixes that.
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@dax_darian · 4mo ago
Be careful with the word too. In some places lifetime has to mean something specific and "we shut down" turns into a refund argument you will lose by email. I write it as a perpetual licence to the current major version plus updates for 24 months. Nobody has ever pushed back on that phrasing.
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