DFIRST Reviews

DFIRST is a powerhouse tool that adds a ton of potential for how freelancers and agencies handle client creatives. I've spent plenty of time trying to organize files, remember what creatives worked for inspiration, and tried to keep opening all my related files to make sure I keep my brand voice, look, and strategy all in line.

DFIRST is a great one-stop shop for simplifying the workflow and bringing it all together while researching and building creatives.

Need to research a social profile or website to see what the brand is about, what strategy it is using, who the audience is, and break down the things that makes that audience tick? DFIRST gives you the building blocks and tool to research with ease.

The default research template workflows do a great job at getting you the basics if you need to do some quick research, but the real gem here is the ability to go through with a fine-tooth comb to edit the research output (if needed), build your own workflow, or add your own context as you like.

While building strategy and creatives, you can use previous items, such as research, brand guides, and more as reference material for what you want to generate. No AI is perfect, so you must always do your due diligence to make sure your output is useable. But the process of going from research to implementing a plan has gone from days, weeks, and months (perhaps even years) to - in many cases - just minutes.

The credit limits certainly feel low when getting into video or heavy amounts of image generation, but it also gives me more hope that this tool will be sustainable going forward compared to others I have tried in the past.

I appreciate all the updates that have been coming out recently, such as their new Brand DNA feature. The areas I'd love to see some improvement are related to UX with the whiteboards and the image editor and perhaps some improved walkthroughs when you first get into the tool, as it can feel a little overwhelming at first and can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack when wanting do do something specific - but I also appreciate all that is currently in place.

The workspace, whiteboard, and social media scraping limits alone are generous in this deal - making it a no-brainer in my book. As long as improvements continue to roll out, DFIRST has a bright future.

5 tacos out of 5

I can see some improvements compared with my last two taco reviews. The product is moving in the right direction, and the potential is clear.

Pros

Support response time has improved, which I appreciate. That makes a real difference when testing a tool seriously and assessing whether it can fit into a professional workflow.

The overall concept is strong. I can see how this could become useful for strategy, content planning, and creative production, especially for agencies and marketing teams.

There are noticeable improvements from previous versions, which shows that the team is listening and continuing to develop the product.

Cons / Areas for improvement

The workflows still need to be faster, smoother, and easier to move through. Right now, there is still too much friction between having an idea and getting to a useful output.

The Whiteboard navigation is one of the main areas that needs improvement. It still feels clunky, and that slows down the creative process. For a tool built around visual thinking, planning, and content creation, the canvas experience needs to feel much more intuitive.

The node generation also needs refinement. The outputs need to follow the right direction more accurately, especially when building structured content flows, campaign ideas, or marketing assets. It should also be easier to edit the nodes afterwards.

I would also like to see longer chats added as a separate option. For deeper strategy work, campaign planning, and more complex creative tasks, short interactions are not always enough.

I also miss stronger support for Instagram and LinkedIn content, especially carousel creation. A useful feature would be the ability to generate carousels directly from a marketing brief. Ideally, the user could upload or write a brief, define the objective and audience, choose how many slides are needed to tell the full story, and let the tool generate the slide-by-slide narrative, visual direction, copy, layout suggestions, and final carousel structure.

Overall

I have high hopes for the product. With faster workflows, better Whiteboard navigation, stronger and more editable node generation, more flexible chat options, improved support, and better carousel tools for Instagram and LinkedIn, this could become one of my go-to tools for my marketing agency.

DFirst is definitely the best purchase I’ve made on AppSumo, or at least one of the best. I liked that the agent is specialized on marketing projects. You’d probably fall even more in love with it if you tried it yourself. I bought Tier 5 and I’m going to upgrade to tier 6 very soon.

But I want to give feedback for improvements:

The things that need improvement are the workspace usability. It seems like it gets stuck when you want to move it around. The assistant sort of lays out the whole plan at once, and then you give feedback bit by bit. It listens to that feedback initially, but if you have a whole list of feedback that you want to go through step by step, it doesn’t really let you. It just takes the first piece of feedback, changes that, and then you basically have no choice but to approve it because it won’t let you keep writing more feedback. You have to approve it or approve it, basically, and that’s something I didn’t like.

And for longer tasks, like if I want to define a brand launch campaign, for example, there are many little steps before getting to the final part, like making assets. There are all these micro-tasks: planning, defining the persona, branding, and so on. If I disagree with the result at any step, it’s a hassle because changing one specific result affects many things that come after it, and every time you make a change, it consumes a lot of credits in the long run. I think it should let you go step-by-step, show you things gradually, and let you approve or tweak them bit by bit instead of forcing you to approve everything at once.

I need this tool for defining launch campaigns, creating the foundations and identity of a brand when it’s being established. I want it to set up marketing plans on at least an annual level, and ideally with a three-year perspective as well. It’s important that it helps define the core elements of the marketing strategy, like which channels to use, what messages to convey, and how to differentiate in the market.

At first glance, DFIRST seems amazing, so I was excited to test out the tool. Before diving in, I watched all their YouTube videos (which isn't much tbh), and then tried using the tool on some ongoing projects we have.

Initially, the tools seems fantastic: it does an amazing job at understanding what I want, and lays out a clear path (that I can also edit!) to achieve the goals I'm looking for. The fact that it also uses multiple AI models, and always recommends the best model for the job is also great.

So, that's the good part...

Now the bad:

1) The training is VERY surface level and incomplete. This means that I a) either need to be a pro at AI agents & workflows already to make things work, or b) waste TONS of credits to figure things out on my own. I'd appreciate a comprehensive onboarding & training experience to get up to speed with DFIRST without having to waste multiple hours of my time, and hundreds (or even thousands) of credits on trying to figure things out on my own with substandard results.

2) The AI workflows/agents aren't as smart as they seem... And by this, I mean many things – just a few examples:
• I asked them to scrape a website and Instagram to understand the brand's colors, language, fonts, and content pillars. They scraped both (apparently successfully), but still used DFIRST's colors, still used English as the language (despite the particular website being in a different language), still just guessed the fonts (incorrectly), and completely missed the content pillars, formats, and visual style. And all this happened multiple times...
• The tool fails to establish a clear, logical workflow... By this, I mean that oftentimes it doesn't reference crucial information or inputs on its own, and wastes A LOT of credits by doing so. Yes, I could technically go in manually and tweak things afterwards, but a) that takes time, and b) that means I've just wasted ~100-200 credits on useless garbage.
• Its foreign language skills are not excellent. Not bad either per se, but it does make errors in languages other than English (so far, I've tried 2 other European languages). Mostly weird capitalization errors, so not that big of a deal, but still...

3) The output is just plain bad. For customer research, I've achieved better results using a single prompt in Gemini Pro alone. The social media posts created in DFIRST are downright terrible. In fact, even within a single workflow, the visual style, the tone of voice, and even the language (!!!) of some of the posts generated are completely different. Let that sink in: the same brand, the same prompt(s), the same workflow. And the 3 posts generated look like posts for 3 different brands, operating in 3 different geographical regions (and one of those completely missed the brand's product, displaying it as a supplement, when in fact, it was a diagnostics product). Not to mention that the posts I've managed to create are terrible as well: lazy, boring, and definitely no potential for engagement, virality, etc.

4) DFIRST is very credit-hungry. I bought the top tier, and already – just by playing around with a few basic workflows (no videos, and barely any images), I've spent about 20% of my monthly credits. Yes, I know there's a relatively inexpensive way to top up my credits, and I also know the tool needs to be sustainable in the long-run... But for the ~$800 I've spent on this tool, I'd be able to buy A LOT of credits, or even multiple years of unlimited subscriptions to mature, established AI tools. At this credit consumption rate, DFIRST feels almost like a ripoff.

5) And finally: while I wasn't affected personally, I see the founders launched a similar tool on AppSumo a few years ago that they've since abandoned. I don't know what happened to their old customers, but after a quick Google search (Digitalfirst Appsumo), I've found the following:
• Customers suddenly losing access to their dashboard (apparently without a warning) – Does this mean they've also lost access to all their generated assets, prompts, databases, and references?
• Customers complaining that there's no clear way to transfer their account to DFIRST, despite it being more-or-less a mature & rebranded version of the same product. – Does this mean that those customers were abandoned?
• Customers complaining about terrible customer support. – Does this mean we can expect a similar experience with DFIRST, especially once the AppSumo campaign (and refund period) are over?
Look, I'm not saying those customers are necessarily right (I have no idea), and I'm not saying us DFIRST customers are in for a bad experience (I certainly hope not) – but this is definitely a red flag that I think all Sumolings should be aware of.

All-in-all, I'll see how DFIRST evolves over the upcoming weeks. What I'm really looking for is a complete onboarding/training experience to ensure I can use the tool as intended. And I also hope they can improve the quality of the AI outputs significantly.

I paid Tier 3 for digitalfirst their first software on AppSumo and they abandoned the project just 2 years after no support or communication. They just started to dress this after launching this new platform. If you google Digitalfirst Appsumo you can still catch the reviews and see that they just recently addressed this to make new money.
About the "new" platform it looks polished and has multiple ai agents and requests running in chain to develop and research from my feeling I'd say you could send multiple requests in one of the popular LLMs to get the same results. It's convenient to use but again seeing this company abandoning their last project just to come back like this smells very fishy to me and I wouldn't bet on that they are going to honor the deal in a year or beyond.