First, I was drawn in by the thought of paying a one-time fee for "lifetime" access to online software. I am a millennial and I'm old enough to remember buying software, video games, music, and movies at the electronics store and owning them for life, not having to worry about updates, ads, or subscriptions. I really think the one-time payment model is fair! I'm pretty excited about that point.

I had my eye on two products in particular that would have cost me $80, so I thought I might as well spend $20 more for this membership and see how it goes. I had read that the membership pays for itself since we are given $25 credit every three months for the year. That sounded really good, but what I was disappointed with is that the credits expire after only about a month. I didn't realize this until after I had paid. I thought I'd be able to save them over time and use them together when I finally have a product in mind that I want to buy. I didn't intend to buy software every quarter, and I really don't want to spend more money on products that cost more than the $25 until I've gotten my $99 back in value, so maybe this extra $20 was a sunken cost. Thankfully, one of the products I wanted to buy was already included in the membership for free and the other one was about $25 (which I used the first credit for), so I was able to get both right away.

One other annoyance so far is that I have 3 promo codes saved in my account and one of them will expire by the end of the year. With this AppSumo Plus Membership, I won't ever get to use it because I can't stack discounts. The third promo code won't expire, but it will just sit there until I'm not a member anymore; I have to wait a year to use it. Further, I can't apply the 10% off in addition to the $25 credit. I'm a solopreneur and need minimal software, so I'll probably never use the 10% discount since getting my money back in $25 increments is my first priority.