AppSumo Black Friday 2024: All 35 Deals Ranked (Tier List)

How the AppSumo Black Friday Tier List Works

Every year, AppSumo drops a curated batch of lifetime deals for Black Friday, and 2024 was no exception — 35 tools in total, released over the course of about two weeks. I reviewed every single one of them, many with full-length dedicated videos, and now it's time to stack-rank them against each other.

This tier list uses a relative ranking system rather than my usual 0–10 score. That means a C-tier tool here isn't necessarily bad — it just didn't stand out compared to the rest of the lineup. The tiers run from S (the absolute best deals) down through A, B, C, and D. If you're trying to decide where to spend your Black Friday budget, this is the cheat sheet.

S Tier: The Must-Buy Deals

Only four tools earned S-tier status this year, and each one represents exceptional value for the price.

**Boost.Space** is an automation platform similar to Zapier, but with a built-in database layer that makes it genuinely unique. There are rumors it's backed by the same team behind Make.com, which would explain its impressive integration library. It's a technical tool — not something you'll pick up in five minutes — but for power users who need robust automation with centralized data storage, it's outstanding.

**VistaCreate** was one of the surprise deals this Black Friday. Think of it as a Canva alternative with a massive template and stock media library. At just $79 for unlimited access including team features and unlimited brands, the value proposition is almost absurd. If you create social media graphics and you're not a professional designer, this is a no-brainer pickup.

**TidyCal** is AppSumo's own calendar booking tool, and it finally launched Tier 2 with team support. It does everything Calendly does at a fraction of the cost — $29 during Black Friday for a lifetime license. It's reliable, customers never complain about the booking experience, and even if AppSumo somehow discontinued it, you'd just migrate to Calendly with zero data loss since everything lives on your calendar. This is the perfect use case for a lifetime deal.

**VideoTap** was the dark horse of the entire event. You feed it a video and it produces written content, social media posts, metadata, excerpts, and even short clips. The output quality was genuinely impressive — far better than expected — and the sheer volume of repurposed content it generates from a single video makes it incredibly efficient for content creators.

A Tier: Excellent Deals Worth Serious Consideration

The A-tier tools are all high-quality products that solve real problems, even if they didn't quite reach the top shelf.

**DepositPhotos** is an AppSumo Black Friday classic at this point — it's been showing up for nearly a decade. Even in the age of AI image generation, professional stock photography still looks more polished and trustworthy. Grabbing another code to keep your account active for another year is a smart move.

**GetSales** stood out as the best cold outreach tool of the bunch (and there were four of them this year). It offers powerful LinkedIn automation plus a solid B2B lead directory, so you're not entirely dependent on LinkedIn for prospecting. If you do any kind of outbound sales, this was the one to grab.

**LayerPath** is a screen recording and interactive guide builder. Compared to Fable (which does something similar), LayerPath produces much more visually polished output and includes features like AI voiceover. There are some minor quirks — PDF exports don't always respect your brand colors, and there are occasional save inconsistencies — but it's very close to S tier.

**Merlin** surprised me the most in this tier. Going in, I expected yet another generic AI chatbot, but Merlin integrates directly into the interfaces of YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium in a way that feels almost native. The implementation is so good it should embarrass the platforms themselves into building similar AI features.

**NeuronWriter** is an AI-assisted SEO writing tool that helps you nail keyword semantics, image counts, and content structure. It won AppSumo's community pick for tool of the year last year, and it's only gotten better since. If you're creating SEO content — especially if you already have draft material to optimize — NeuronWriter is a strong choice.

**Trafft** is a booking tool built specifically for service-based businesses: yoga studios, salons, music schools, that sort of thing. It handles in-person appointments, group sessions, and the kind of scheduling complexity that tools like Calendly weren't designed for. If you're currently paying for MindBody or Acuity Scheduling, Trafft could save you thousands per year.

**Press Ranger** solves a problem most businesses don't even realize they have: getting media attention. It helps you draft press releases, find podcast guest spots, and get placement in publications. Building public visibility before doing cold outreach makes your outreach dramatically more effective — people are far more receptive when they've already heard of you.

**SuperCopy** takes an interesting approach to AI copywriting by learning about your company, goals, and target personas upfront. Instead of re-describing your business with every prompt, you select the persona and product, and it generates marketing copy with that context baked in. It's a genuinely novel implementation that I hadn't seen done this well before.

B Tier: Solid Tools for the Right User

B tier ended up being the most crowded category, which actually says a lot about the overall quality of this year's Black Friday lineup. These are all good tools — they just have narrower audiences or minor drawbacks.

**Afforai** is an AI research assistant geared toward academics, though it works for organizing any kind of research. Its lack of feature bloat is actually a strength — it stays focused on what it does well. **Brilliant Directories** lets you build directory and membership websites. It looks slightly dated but is simple enough for most people to work with. **ElementsKit** adds extra functionality to WordPress Elementor sites, though purists might want to stick with core blocks first.

**Gumlet Video** is a video hosting platform with impressive YouTube-like features including channels, playlists, and subscribe buttons. It would rank higher except that 4K video is locked behind Tier 3 — in 2024, that should be standard. **Mailead** is a cold email outreach tool with generous limits, made by the same team behind TaskMagic. If email is your primary outreach channel (rather than LinkedIn), it edges out GetSales for that specific use case.

**Minvo** is the long-form-to-shorts repurposing tool that had a lot of hype going in. It's genuinely good, but the AI writer feature wasn't fully baked, and for screen-recording-style content, you'll still end up doing significant manual editing. **NytroSEO** dynamically updates your page metadata via a script snippet — clever in concept, but relying on a third-party script for something as critical as your page titles feels risky long-term. Better used as a temporary band-aid while you fix your CMS configuration.

**Squirrly SEO** packs serious functionality into a WordPress plugin but has a notoriously confusing interface. **ZeroWork** is a scraping and automation tool that's genuinely fun to use but only makes sense for a narrow audience of data-hungry growth hackers. **Remo** is a virtual events platform with a creative skeuomorphic interface, though the post-pandemic cooldown on virtual events has limited its moment. **ReelCraft** generates AI videos from prompts and animates still photos — fun and capable, but you need the right brand identity to pull off AI-generated video content. **Eurekaa** helps research and outline online courses, ideal for serial course creators but overkill if you're just making one. **Thoughtly** is a jaw-dropping AI phone agent that can make and receive real calls, but it's still too early and too expensive for most businesses to deploy seriously. And **Straico** rounds out B tier as a solid AI chatbot that lets you query four LLMs simultaneously — it ranks just below Merlin but has its own strengths.

C Tier: Decent but Limited

C-tier tools aren't bad — they just didn't stand out in a competitive lineup.

**Albato** is a Zapier-style automation tool that skews more technical and developer-oriented. For most people, the learning curve won't be worth it when more approachable alternatives exist. **Fable** records your screen and auto-generates tutorials and SOPs, but the output isn't visually polished enough for user-facing guides where design trust matters — especially when LayerPath does the same thing better.

**LaunchCart** is a feature-packed e-commerce platform that checks a lot of boxes on paper. The concern is that you're trusting your live e-commerce operations to a smaller provider without owning the underlying website. If something happened to their business, you'd be in trouble. That risk, combined with dated aesthetics, keeps it in C tier despite its impressive feature set.

**ZooTools** is one of the prettiest newsletter tools reviewed all Black Friday, but it falls short on actual functionality. Keep an eye on it for the future. **TaskMagic** has an interesting keyboard-and-mouse automation angle, but the free trial only showcased features locked to high-end AppSumo tiers, making it hard to evaluate fairly. **Nowa** is a no-code app builder running Flutter under the hood — capable but not polished enough in design, and the cross-platform output never quite feels native. **OneTake** promises automated video post-production but doesn't yet deliver results that replace a real editor.

D Tier: Proceed with Caution

Only two tools landed in D tier, and they share a common thread: they simply didn't work reliably.

**BHuman AI** and **BHuman Persona** were the most frustrating tools of the entire Black Friday event. After spending hours trying to get them to function properly, the experience was plagued by inconsistencies and what appeared to be technical outages. Other BHuman users reported that the tools worked well in the early days but have been spotty ever since. When you can't reliably use a tool, it's impossible to recommend it regardless of the concept's potential.

Final Verdict: AppSumo Black Friday 2024

Looking at the final tier list, what stands out most is how evenly distributed the rankings are. The B tier is absolutely packed — nearly twice the size of any other category — which speaks to the overall quality AppSumo brought this year. Very few tools were genuinely bad; most were solidly built products that just serve narrower audiences.

The clear winners are **TidyCal**, **VideoTap**, **VistaCreate**, and **Boost.Space** in S tier. If you're only picking up a few deals, start there. The A-tier tools — DepositPhotos, GetSales, LayerPath, Merlin, NeuronWriter, Trafft, Press Ranger, and SuperCopy — are all excellent choices if they fit your specific workflow.

One theme that kept coming up: the best lifetime deals are the ones where you lose nothing if the company disappears. Calendar tools, stock photo credits, and content generation tools all fall into this category. E-commerce platforms and tools that host your critical business data are riskier bets as lifetime deals. Keep that framework in mind when evaluating any LTD, not just during Black Friday.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.