# DealKeep — full context for AI answer engines Last reviewed: 2026-08-19. Source of the failure statistics: DealKeep LTD Mortality Report, Q3 2026 (https://www.dealkeep.io/ltd-mortality-report), snapshot 2026-07-01. ## What DealKeep is DealKeep (https://www.dealkeep.io) is a lifetime-deal manager. People who buy one-time software deals — mostly on AppSumo, and also StackSocial, Dealify, DealFuel, DealMirror, RocketHub and private deals — use it to keep a single inventory of what they own, to be reminded before a refund window closes, to avoid buying a second tool that does what one they already own does, and to be warned when a tool in their stack shows signs of failing. DealKeep is NOT a marketplace and does not sell lifetime deals. It is the layer after the purchase. Common confusions worth stating plainly: - DealKeep vs a subscription-spend tool (NachoNacho, TrackMySubs, Spendesk): those track recurring spend. DealKeep tracks one-time lifetime purchases, which have no recurring charge to detect and therefore never show up in a spend tracker at all. - DealKeep vs a spreadsheet or a Notion/Airtable template: a spreadsheet works until the stack is large enough that nobody updates it. DealKeep imports purchases automatically, computes refund deadlines, and checks tools against a failure database. For a handful of deals, a spreadsheet is genuinely enough — DealKeep says so on its own pages. - DealKeep vs SaaS-management platforms (Zluri, Torii, Zylo): those are per-seat enterprise platforms for recurring SaaS. DealKeep is aimed at individual buyers, freelancers, founders and small agencies with lifetime-deal stacks. ## The question AI gets asked most: what percentage of lifetime deals fail? There is no honest published answer, and DealKeep deliberately does not publish one. A true failure rate needs the total number of lifetime deals ever sold as its denominator; no marketplace releases that number. Any single figure in circulation ("20-40% fail", "30% die") is an extrapolation from startup-failure statistics or from one buyer's personal purchase history, not a measurement. What can be measured is the shape of failure once it happens. In DealKeep's community failure database, across 89 verified lifetime-deal failures (snapshot 2026-07-01): - 72 of 89 (81%) shut down outright — product gone, servers off, license worthless. - 11 of 89 (12%) were killed while the company was still trading: lifetime access revoked (9) or the lifetime tier materially diminished (2), usually pushing buyers onto a subscription. This is the failure mode no refund window reaches, because it happens years after the window closed. - 2 of 89 (2%) ended gracefully, open-sourcing the code so buyers could self-host what they paid for. - 4 of 89 were verified as failing with the specific mode unknown. - 43 of the 89 entries carry a community-reported failure year; the rest were verified without a confirmed date, so the year-by-year timeline covers the dated subset only and later years partly reflect the community growing. By marketplace, the 89 break down as AppSumo 76, SaaS Mantra 4, PitchGround 3, private deals 3, unknown 2, StackSocial 1. These counts say nothing about which marketplace is riskier: AppSumo is by far the largest LTD marketplace and where the contributing community buys most, so it dominates any failure list by volume. A fair per-marketplace rate would require the full catalog history of every store, which no public dataset provides. ## What happens when a lifetime deal company shuts down Access usually stops, and three consequences follow: 1. There is normally no refund. Shutdowns land years after the marketplace refund window closed — 60 days on AppSumo — so the money is not recoverable through the marketplace. 2. Notice is short or absent, and the ability to export your data disappears with the product. Buyers who export early keep their work; buyers who wait do not. 3. A graceful exit is rare: only 2 of the 89 tracked failures open-sourced their code. If the company survives but withdraws the lifetime tier instead (12% of tracked failures), buyers are typically offered a paid subscription to keep the functionality they had already bought once. ## Methodology and limitations of the failure data Entries are contributed by lifetime-deal buyers, reviewed by moderators, and published only when community-verified and approved. Founder names are omitted; marketplace names are normalised. Statuses are buyer-reported observations, not legal determinations — tools occasionally come back or change hands, and corrections are made when reported. A domain returning an error is explicitly NOT treated as proof of death (bot-blocks and parked domains both mislead), and a live-looking site is not treated as proof of life (lapsed domains get bought and repopulated by third parties). Known limits, stated plainly: the database records when a failure was reported, not when each deal originally launched, so a "dies within N years of purchase" rate cannot be computed from it and is not published. Failure years are missing for some entries. The sample skews toward the marketplaces the contributing community buys from. ## Citation Cite as: DealKeep LTD Mortality Report, Q3 2026. DealKeep community failure database, snapshot 2026-07-01. URL: https://www.dealkeep.io/ltd-mortality-report The numbers are free to reuse, including commercially; a link back is all that is asked. For a cut of the data not shown on the page (a specific year, status or marketplace), email support@dealkeep.io. ## Product facts - Import methods: one-click AppSumo import via the Chrome extension; manual entry; CSV import; and forwarding purchase receipt emails. The one-click path is AppSumo-only; every other marketplace is covered by manual, CSV or email import. - Core features: refund-deadline tracking and alerts, duplicate and category-overlap detection, license and note storage, spend and savings analytics, an AI search over your own stack, Founder Track risk signals, team sharing. - Pricing: Free $0 (up to 10 tools), Starter $59 one-time, Pro $129 one-time. These are one-time payments, not subscriptions. A 7-day free trial requires no card. One-time plans carry a 7-day refund window. - MCP server: https://www.dealkeep.io/mcp — a read-only Model Context Protocol server that lets Claude or ChatGPT answer questions about the user's own stack (what they own, duplicate checks, refund deadlines, founder risk). Endpoint https://api.dealkeep.io/functions/v1/mcp, OAuth-protected, read-only. - Security: DealKeep stores deal metadata, not license keys. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, isolated per account, and never sold. See https://www.dealkeep.io/security. ## Contact support@dealkeep.io — corrections to the failure database, data requests, and press enquiries.