Our AppSumo campaign is officially over!

Here's the good, the bad, and what I'd tell AppSumo to change.

FYI: my product is Sendpilot AI.

============

📊 THE NUMBERS:

→ $517,500 in sales (around 40-50% is ours)

→ 3,640 paying customers

→ 119 reviews (4.6 rating)

→ 14,5% refund rate

============

✅ THE GOOD:

• Sendpilot went from unknown to being mentioned regularly in GTM conversations.
• We built a community of 525 Slack members and 6,000+ email addresses. Many of them will help grow Sendpilot.
• We will have capital to invest in marketing, SEO, and hiring.
• SEO, mentions, and lots of positive reviews on G2 and on AppSumo.
• A few well-known companies signed up. We can use their logo's for social proof.

============

⛔ THE BAD:

• Refunds ended at 14.5%. The first month it was 2.5%. A 3-day campaign bug, support overload, and burnout pushed it up fast. We lost around $142,000 in sales because of this :/
• Support volume took over my day completely. I missed DMs and opportunities I'll never get back.

============

😢 THE REGRETS (what I'd do differently):

• Build a help center before launching. 90% of tickets asked the same questions.
• Hire a support rep before day one, not after.
• Prepare in-app upsells before going live.

============

🤝 THE APPSUMO EXPERIENCE:

Worth it. I'd recommend it. But it's not passive. You need a solid product and the willingness to grind.

Three things I'd suggest they change:

1. Reduce campaign length from 60 to 30 days. We made 60% of sales in the first 14. The last 46 days were slow and drained the team. Shorter campaigns keep energy high.
2. Don't launch competing tools during an active campaign. Midway through ours, similar tools went live on AppSumo. It hurts partner morale and splits the audience. Partners should feel protected during their window. Another reason to reduce campaign duration.
3. Build a partner app with purchase notifications. Dropshippers talk about the first sale notification as a special feeling. AppSumo partners deserve that too. It's a small thing that would make a real difference to motivation.

============

To our 3,640 customers: thank you.

To those who missed the lifetime deal: I hope you regret it 😉

AIRLOUPE E-MAIL:

Hi there,

Welcome to Airloupe News.

I want to share an important update about Airloupe and where we’re heading.

Over the past several months, I’ve been working behind the scenes to stabilize, improve, and grow the platform. As a photographer myself based in San Francisco, my goal has always been simple: build a platform that I would genuinely want to use every day in my own business—and one that serves you reliably long-term.

When I acquired Airloupe, lifetime plans were already in place from the previous ownership. I did everything I could to keep those plans active for as long as possible—holding off on any changes for the past 6 months while covering infrastructure costs and continuing development.

Unfortunately, the reality is that the current cost structure makes it impossible to sustainably improve and grow the platform while supporting lifetime plans.

After a lot of consideration, I’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue lifetime plans.

This decision wasn’t taken lightly. The alternative would ultimately be shutting down the platform altogether—which was actually the direction things were heading before I stepped in. My goal is the opposite: to give Airloupe a real future and continue building it over the next 10+ years.

What this means for you:

• All your existing images will remain online and fully accessible,
• All galleries will continue to function as they do today,
• Your clients will not be impacted in any way,
• Moving forward, uploading new content will require an active plan

The user experience and reliability of the platform remain my top priorities.

A thank-you to early supporters:

Some of you have been here for nearly 3 years—that’s incredible, and I don’t take that lightly.

To recognize your support, I’m offering an early adopter discount:

XXXX REDACTED - I WILL NOT ADVERTISE FOR THIEVES XXXX

Why this change matters:

I want to keep Airloupe 100% independent and bootstrapped. That means no outside investors, no pressure from people who don’t use the product, and no decisions driven purely by profit over users.

It also means the platform needs a sustainable foundation.

This change allows me to:

• Invest in faster performance and better infrastructure
• Continue improving galleries, delivery, and video features
• Compete with existing platforms at a higher level
• Build something meaningful for the long term

I know changes like this aren’t easy, and I’m genuinely sorry it has to be this way. But I strongly believe this is the right move to give Airloupe a real future.

Now that the newsletter system is in place, I’ll also be sharing more regular updates directly in the platform via the News tab in the support widget—so you can stay informed on improvements and new features as they roll out.

Thank you again for being part of this journey.

AdrienVillez

MyMemo was one of the APPSUMO deals that you thought this is worth a chance. In an Information Age when your grasping to keep your knowledge in one place and there is an opportunity for it to bring it back to you in a podcast way as well as file it and formulate it together. For someone with special needs and ADD I thought this might be something. They also have a channel in discord to be a part off for bugs and support. But when logins failed and connections through your iPhone gives errors after a while it’s not worth the trouble and it becomes one of the many sumo products your bought that could have been.

Then I connected with the creator and said I really want to use this for people with disabilities but I’m having trouble understanding all the features and maybe it’s my add and would like some one on one support so I can help other. I was then connected to someone in support. Guess what it’s been 3 months since I messaged them in detail in regards to why I wanted a call. It’s unfortunate when we as users and more as possible collaborators love a product from APPSUMO only to then not get the support. Lack luster product updates, sign on errors and then see your back on AppSumo again. MyMemo has so much potential but not if you don’t get back to people.

AppSumo why you don’t market for yourself? Like success stories, amounts entrepreneurs saved? Like branding and public image

I feel that AppSumo treats itself as an ecom marketplace, just some product catalog ads and that’s about it.

Bika ai from the AITable .ai original AS is sunsetting to a new platform. I tried to login to this and I am a just a free member. This sucks...

As per their site

For a long time, Bika was never just a product name to us.

It carried many of our core beliefs about the future of work software, and it also carried a very real chapter of our company story.

We wanted software to do more than record work.

We wanted automation to do more than connect steps.

We wanted AI to do more than chat.

We wanted a system that could actually help run work.

That is why this post is not easy to write.

We want to say something clearly:

Bika is not disappearing, but it is entering limited maintenance. Our main product direction is moving to Buda.

This is not a polished positioning sentence. It is the result of a long internal struggle, many attempts to keep pushing Bika forward, and eventually admitting that the future we want to build needs a different foundation.

First, the vision did not change

If we reduce both Bika and Buda to one line, the vision has actually stayed the same:

We were never trying to build just another AI chatbot.

What we wanted was a system that could:

understand context

use tools

execute ongoing work

collaborate with a team

and eventually participate in the daily operation of a company

So this shift is not about abandoning the original idea.

The vision is the same. What changed is the technical path and the product shape.

And eventually we had to admit something difficult:

to achieve that same vision, Bika was no longer the best path forward.

What Bika taught us

If Bika did not exist, Buda would not exist.

Bika was not some failed prelude. It was the stage where we pushed several important ideas far enough to finally see both their power and their limits.

1. Bika proved that complex work can be packaged into one powerful system

Bika was ambitious by design.

It did not try to solve one tiny workflow. It tried to bring multiple layers of work into one integrated product:

spreadsheets and databases

agents

docs

automation

dashboards

reusable template packages

Our belief was simple: the hardest business problems are rarely solved by a single isolated tool.

Real work usually spans:

data structures

workflows

documents

automation

AI reasoning and generation

So Bika tried to merge them into one template package, so users would not just get features. They would get a full working solution.

We still believe that instinct was right.

And to be direct: Bika is powerful.

If you really go deep into it, it can solve complicated work problems that many traditional SaaS products cannot hold together in one place.

2. But Bika's power also created its own complexity

Once you merge spreadsheets, agents, docs, and automation into one system, and then wrap that into reusable template packages, you gain a lot of capability.

But you also create a very real cost:

the interaction model becomes more complex.

A new user is no longer learning one product. They are trying to understand an entire work system.

That creates real friction:

onboarding becomes harder

the mental model becomes heavier

the product becomes less immediately intuitive

the philosophy of the product loses some of its original charm

This was the tradeoff we kept feeling inside Bika.

The capability was real.

But the entry point stopped feeling simple.

And once a product starts feeling like "a very complete and very powerful system that needs to be learned," rather than "an exciting and clear new way to work," something important gets diluted.

3. The deeper limitation was in the agent engine itself

There was also a more fundamental issue underneath the product surface.

Bika's agent layer was still largely built around API orchestration.

That works for many useful workflows. It is enough to build a lot of valuable features.

But if you really want an agent to behave more like a long-running employee than a triggered function, you start to hit a wall.

A real agent cannot just be a chain of API calls scheduled from the outside.

It needs its own working environment.

It needs:

its own independent drive

persistent context

its own file system

isolation

a long-running sandbox

a runtime that can actually execute real tasks

That is where Bika had a structural weakness.

It could connect many capabilities, but it was not built from day one around the principle that an agent should own an independent sandbox drive and a persistent place to work.

And over time, we came to believe this was not a nice-to-have.

It was foundational.

Without an independent workspace, an isolated sandbox, and a persistent drive where files, context, and execution traces can accumulate over time, an agent feels less like a real worker and more like a repeatedly invoked capability.

4. We no longer wanted to build an "AI-feature-rich SaaS"

As Bika evolved, it became increasingly clear to us that we did not really want to keep adding AI into an older software shape.

What we wanted was something more radical:

That was the tension we kept wrestling with internally.

Because once you admit that, a lot of the work you could continue doing inside Bika starts drifting away from the future you actually want to build.

That is hard to accept emotionally.

Once you have already spent years building something, you naturally keep asking:

can we just add one more capability?

can we improve the onboarding one more time?

can we finish one more module?

can we postpone admitting that the path itself has changed?

We asked ourselves those questions for a long time.

Why we decided to pivot

Put simply: continuing to invest most of our energy into Bika was no longer the most honest choice.

Not because Bika had no value.

But because we became increasingly certain that the future we actually wanted to build required a different technical base and a different product center of gravity.

That path became Buda.

If we had to summarize the difference in one line:

Bika explored how AI, spreadsheets, docs, and automation could be fused into one powerful work system

Buda is built around an agent-native runtime so an AI Organizer can actually help run a company

This is not just a branding update.

It is a product paradigm shift.

What Buda changes technically

Buda is not a random new story.

It carries forward the deepest beliefs we developed while building Bika, but it narrows the focus and rebuilds from a different technical premise.

If Bika taught us that:

AI should not just chat

automation should not just trigger schedules

systems need memory and context

work software should execute, not just describe work

then Buda asks the next question:

What kind of runtime, workspace, and product architecture do you need if AI is supposed to function like a real team member?

That is why Buda starts from a different place.

It emphasizes:

multi-agent collaboration instead of a single assistant

persistent workspaces instead of disposable sessions

real execution environments like Browser, Terminal, Drive, and Git

team-level orchestration instead of personal experimentation

infrastructure designed for long-running, isolated, manageable agent work

More concretely, Buda is different because:

agents run inside a cloud sandbox, not just through a thin orchestration layer

each agent has its own independent Drive

workspaces are isolated, so agent contexts do not bleed into each other

agents can operate in real execution environments instead of only returning text

the system is built around stronger Coding Agents and Agent Skills

This means Buda feels less like "SaaS with AI added in" and more like an operating environment built for AI workers.

It does not merely support agents.

It first creates independent sandboxes, independent drives, and persistent workspaces, and then lets agents actually live and work inside them.

That difference matters.

This was not an easy decision

From the outside, any pivot can sound like one short sentence:

"The company changed direction."

Inside, it is never that simple.

Usually it means:

admitting that some earlier plans should not continue

accepting that not every previous investment extends cleanly

facing the tension between old users, old pages, old narratives, and a new future

answering the hardest question again: what exactly are we building for now?

For us, the hard part was not coming up with a new name.

The hard part was admitting this:

if we kept treating Bika as the main battlefield, we would not end up where we actually wanted to go.

In startups, the hardest thing is often not making a decision.

It is stopping yourself from continuing the wrong self-justification.

We went through that process.

What this means for Bika users

We do not want to be vague about it.

From this point forward:

Bika is entering limited maintenance

we will prioritize basic stability over expanding the product surface

most new core product investment will go into Buda

This does not mean Bika disappears tomorrow.

It does not mean existing users are suddenly cut off.

But it does mean something important:

if you want to understand where our product direction is going, or where future capability development will happen, you should start looking at Buda.

Why we wanted to say this publicly

We do not want to quietly swap traffic or hide behind vague copy.

If the direction changed, we should explain why.

Users deserve that honesty.

And frankly, we needed to write this for ourselves too.

This is not just a product introduction.

It is a checkpoint.

It is our attempt to:

summarize the past honestly

explain today's tradeoffs clearly

and place a real bet on the future

This post is not about making Bika look worse so Buda can look better.

If anything, the opposite is true.

Bika mattered enough that we felt we owed it a real explanation.

If this resonates, come look at Buda

If you followed Bika all the way here, thank you.

Your feedback, your criticism, and the ways you actually used the product all shaped what Buda became.

And if you care about these questions:

can AI actually do work for a team?

can agents become more than demos?

can future software evolve from tool collections into systems of AI workers?

then we genuinely invite you to take a look at Buda.

Visit Buda

We are not going to pretend the path is perfectly clear.

We do not have every answer.

But we do understand the problem much more clearly now.

Bika got us here.

And the future we want to build now lives in Buda.

TL;DR:
In my testing, files can remain accessible via direct URLs even after a page is unshared or content is deleted, meaning previously shared files may still be reachable if someone has the link.Why bydesign keeping files on server even after user deleted files?

I was testing a workflow in ByDesign io productivity app and noticed something I wanted to share and sanity-check with others.

Result: In my testing, the file continued to load via the direct URL in these scenarios.
Notably, this included cases where content had been deleted, indicating that files may remain accessible via previously obtained links even after users attempt to remove them.

What I tested

Across multiple flows (pages and chat attachments):

1. Upload a file to a page or share content
2. Obtain the direct file URL
3. Unshare the page or delete the content (including clearing trash)
4. Revisit the direct URL

Result: In my testing, the file continued to load via the direct URL in these scenarios.

Why this matters

If access revocation doesn’t fully propagate to underlying storage:

• Previously shared files may remain accessible after “unshare” or deletion
• Links saved by collaborators, emails, or logs could continue to work
• Users may assume content is no longer accessible when it still is via direct links

Example scenarios

• A file shared with a client remains accessible after access is revoked
• Internal documents shared temporarily remain accessible after cleanup
• Attachments shared in chat remain accessible even after deletion

Expected behavior

• Access should be revoked or rotated when permissions change
• File URLs should no longer resolve after deletion/unshare
• Access control should be enforced consistently at the storage level

Disclosure

I reported this privately to the team via support and email and shared reproduction details. I have not received a response so far, and wanted to raise awareness in case others are relying on similar workflows.

Part of the behavior appears to have been addressed, but I was still able to reproduce access under additional conditions during retesting.

I have intentionally not included any live links or sensitive data here, even though I was able to access files after deletion in testing, to avoid any potential misuse.

For users

Until clarified or resolved:

• Avoid using share option. If you share page, it creates direct links which can be accessed by other even if unshared or deleted.
• Avoid uploading sensitive data to bydesign

Hey guys, you may remember BHuman and they had a few supplementary products (e.g. BHuman Persona) that they were selling in 2024/2025 through AppSumo. I bought and haven't really touched it, but when I tried to log in today, I immediately became concerned, principally because it emails out a verification code (it always did this), but the difference is that I no longer actually get a code associated with my account.

I sent them an email hoping that this is a misunderstanding, but.... with all the deceptive partners on AppSumo, my heart is pretty sunk. I don't want to calculate my actual confirmed losses yet but it's now in the five figures.

https://preview.redd.it/gwk1l6dkejzg1.png?width=1517&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a1c89e1d373fb451904842ace41a04c924bd65b

There is a interesting notetaker on AppSumo that will end in 10 days, FYI.

They have 10 x 5 tacos out of 11, works great, it needs a bit help with navigation and UX/UI, but the insights might be interesting for you to check.

Definitely more precise than others I tried.

https://preview.redd.it/77eayz98mvzg1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=e65c02c982d5b258e1bf722bcff3c8ca6c29d05e

Can we find a solution with this? After buying a tier 4, now I need to pay 450$/month to get the same features someone is paying 6$/month for.
With my actual setup: 10 accounts I 402$ extra by using my Appsumo account that I already payed for compared to a new account I create.

Took a look at the Discord and it looks bleak. Curious how long the community thinks Straico has.

For quite some time i have been working on a social media scheduling tool. I use it for my business purposes on regular basis.

Apart from regular social media scheduling, i am offering rss autmation (fetches optimised images for each platform) and API scheduling.

I dont know what else to provide to appsumo team to get on appsumo.

It’s been two weeks since i applied to appsumo to list my saas smallforcehq dot com. How much time does it usually take?

Been building two SAAS, one helps devs to convert their sites into PWA in a minute by just installing a script, and it offers metrics for how many people installed your site on their devices (mobile or desktop).
The one is an email verification system.
Which one would you recommend I take to appsumo?
Will appreciate your feedback.

Since appsumo made the effort to include Sendapp on an add targeting me, some observations:

-positively glowing ai summary despite 1/8 comments being positive

-hasn't answered questions that are months old

-actively being sold and featured in ads, despite various reviews of causing users' accounts being banned.

It's giving severe mistrust signals.

I've bought a lot of great apps on appsumo.. I'm surprised the platform would risk its reputation with apps like this when there are good apps on the platform.

I’m currently in the waiting room for AppSumo Select (submitted my application recently) and wanted to get some honest feedback from this group of veteran Sumo-lings.

The Product: A profit logic tool for Shopify store owners built via Google App Script.

The Goal: To give sellers a dashboard inside their spreadsheet that tracks:

Real-time SKU profitability

Refund impact on actual health/margins

Store health status (identifying losses before they stack up)

Why I’m posting: I know the Select team has a high bar for UI and scalability. Since mine is App Script-based, I'm wondering:

As a buyer, do you prefer a dedicated SaaS UI, or is the convenience of having it in a Google Sheet/Excel environment a plus for you?

Does Profit Logic/Refund Tracking feel like a big enough pain point for you to grab a Lifetime Deal (LTD)?

If you saw this on AppSumo, what would be the deal-breaker for you?

I’ve had some good feedback on Reddit so far, but I want the Sumo-ling perspective on whether this feels like a Select caliber tool or if I should just self-list on the Marketplace and keep moving.

Be as brutal as you need to be! Thanks.

Hi, i am going to launch my website on Appsumo. First I have made it for Indian users (razorpay integration). So basically it's an marketing voiceover tool. Where you upload images - the tool extracts the context - generates a marketing script - provides an AI voiceover. I wanted to understand if the website has the potential to generate meaningful revenue.

Offering monthly AI credits for life just doesn't work.
The cost is too high.
How do founders launching on AppSumo make this work?

There's a large amount of very low or 1 previous purchase buyers on products recently.. Has AS looked into them? It's kinda obvious it's from the teams themselves.

So many times they have said they are on top of it..

I regularly see lot of chrome extensions being launched on appsumo. I have tried to rebuild them using plugthis.ai and have been successful, dint face any major challenges.

I have been regularly posting rebuild videos on Youtube and X dog fooding, the app rebuilding existing extensions.

I want feedback on the landing page and product offering. Is something on not clear, how can I make this tool, more valuable to users. Please share your thoughts.