AppSumo Black Friday 2024 Drop #2: All 15 Deals Reviewed

AppSumo Black Friday Drop #2 Overview

Black Friday week means AppSumo has rolled out their seasonal deals, and this year's second drop features 15 tools across a wide range of categories. From project management to social media scheduling, reporting dashboards to referral programs, there's a lot to dig through.

Rather than giving you a surface-level glance at each deal, I'm breaking down every single one with honest thoughts on who each tool is actually for, where it falls short, and whether or not it's worth your money. Some of these are genuinely excellent deals. Others are situational at best. Let's get into it.

Oveyond: Client Reporting Made Simple

Oveyond is a reporting and dashboard platform aimed at agencies and business owners who need to present KPIs in a clean, digestible format. If you're running ads, managing social media accounts, or handling any kind of client-facing work, this gives you a polished way to show progress without drowning people in spreadsheets.

What stands out about Oveyond is its simplicity. You can pull together reports quickly using their built-in integrations, which is a major advantage over something like Google Data Studio. Data Studio is powerful and free, but it has a steep learning curve and can be overkill for straightforward client reporting. Oveyond won't work with every platform under the sun, but if your tools are in their integration list, it's a genuinely good deal for agencies.

WP Reset: A Developer's Power Tool (Not a Backup Plugin)

WP Reset is one of the most misunderstood tools on AppSumo. The name suggests it just nukes your WordPress site, and while it does do that (the free version handles basic resets), it's actually a full developer toolkit for people who build WordPress sites at scale.

The key distinction: WP Reset is not a backup plugin. It does have some incremental snapshot capabilities, similar to Time Machine on a Mac, but it won't back up your entire website. If your server goes down, you can't restore from WP Reset alone. Where it shines is for developers who build multiple WordPress sites per month and need tools to speed up their workflow. If you're only building one site a month or less, you probably won't get enough value from this deal.

SweetDash: A Client Portal With UI Concerns

SweetDash positions itself as an all-in-one client portal where your customers can track project progress, view billing, and interact with your team. On paper, it checks a lot of boxes. In practice, the user interface is a dealbreaker for me.

I have a hard rule at my agency: anything client-facing either needs to be guided by a person or the UI needs to be an exceptional experience. Looking at the SweetDash screenshots, the interface just isn't up to that standard. I know plenty of people love this deal, and your business requirements may be completely different from mine. But in general, I've never found an all-in-one client portal that truly excels at everything a growing business needs. This one's a pass for me, but your mileage may vary.

Deposit Photos: The Reliable Stock Photo Investment

If there's a classic AppSumo deal at this point, Deposit Photos is it. For $39, you get 100 credits that never expire, and each credit gets you one photo or vector. It's not technically a lifetime deal in the recurring sense, but the credits last forever and the quality is excellent.

Deposit Photos competes with Adobe Stock and Getty Images. It won't have quite as massive a library as those platforms, but the photo quality is genuinely high. This isn't Pexels-level stock photography where you see the same images recycled across every website. Custom photography is always the gold standard, but the reality of content production in 2024 means you need stock photos. I pick up credits every time this deal appears on AppSumo, which is usually around Black Friday.

Frase: SEO Content That Depends on Your Niche

Frase is an SEO content creation tool designed to help you figure out what questions your audience is asking so you can write content that answers them. It's a solid concept, and tools like this can be a real competitive edge for content marketing.

Here's the catch, and this applies to nearly every tool in this category: performance varies wildly by industry. Frase might deliver incredible insights for one niche and completely useless results for another. I've reviewed several of these applications over the years, and they all hit the same wall. My recommendation: take advantage of AppSumo's 60-day refund policy. Grab a code, test it with your actual industry and keywords, and refund if the results aren't there. This is exactly the kind of deal that refund policy was made for.

FreshLMS: Why I'd Still Choose WordPress for Courses

FreshLMS is a hosted learning management system, and while I haven't used it directly, my concerns are with the category rather than the product itself. If you're building an online course business, the platform hosting your courses is mission-critical infrastructure. With a hosted solution, you're handing control of your business to someone else's servers and someone else's management decisions.

If FreshLMS has infrastructure problems, your site goes down and you can't just migrate to another server. If the company runs into trouble, exporting your courses and moving to a self-hosted solution becomes a nightmare. My recommendation is WordPress with a good LMS plugin. It's harder to set up, no question, but you own the infrastructure. If I were forced to use a hosted platform, I'd go with Kajabi, which starts around $150 per month. The lifetime deal pricing of FreshLMS is tempting, but the trade-off in control isn't worth it for me.

Happy Scribe: Transcription for the Right Use Case

Happy Scribe uses machine learning to transcribe your audio and video files. It's not human-powered, so it won't be perfect, but the real question is whether it's the right solution for your workflow.

For subtitles, most major platforms like YouTube and Facebook already handle transcription for free and will only get better over time. For turning transcripts into blog posts, it's a more romantic idea than a practical one. People don't speak the way they write, and reading a raw transcript is a painful experience. You'll still need a writer to polish it into something readable.

Where Happy Scribe actually makes sense is for podcasters and medium-sized content creators who self-host their content. The entry-level plan gets you two hours per month for $69 one-time. If you're doing a weekly podcast, that might work. Four hours covers most weekly hour-long episodes. For occasional video creators who just need a transcript here and there, a per-job service like Rev.com is probably a better fit.

IdeaNote, If-So, and MailPoet: Quick Takes

IdeaNote is an idea collection and collaboration tool, and honestly, it doesn't fit my workflow. Between Slack and a good project management system, I already have places to capture and discuss ideas. Adding another folder to the mix feels like extra work. The one interesting feature is embedding a feedback widget on your website for visitor input, but I'd rather use a dedicated conversion rate optimization tool for that.

If-So is one of my top AppSumo deals this year. It's a WordPress plugin for dynamic content, letting you customize what visitors see based on their properties. Think A/B testing, location-based messaging showing a visitor's town name, or personalized CTAs. The use cases are nearly endless, which is both its strength and its challenge since you need to be creative to get the most out of it.

MailPoet is a transactional email service built directly into WordPress. It can handle newsletters and even replace your WooCommerce emails. The limitation that bugs me is the subscriber cap of 5,000 per website for a single code. I'd rather have unlimited subscribers across fewer sites. For small local businesses that won't hit 5,000 subscribers, this is a solid deal. For anyone else, Amazon SES with unlimited subscribers is the better play.

Nifty: The Best AppSumo Project Management Deal

If I had to pick a single favorite AppSumo project management deal of all time, it would be Nifty. The biggest thing it gets right is the user interface. A project management tool has to be enjoyable to use, otherwise people stop logging their work, tasks slip through the cracks, and everything falls apart.

I've been using ClickUp for years and generally like it, but they're suffering from feature bloat. They keep adding features to the point where teammates get overwhelmed and don't know which dashboard or view to use. Nifty stays more focused, and I genuinely hope they resist the temptation to keep piling on features.

One important caveat: if you already have a project management system your team knows well, don't switch to Nifty just because the lifetime cost is $49. The retraining period, productivity dip, and migration headaches can easily outweigh the savings. Nifty is a fantastic choice if you're starting fresh. If you're already deep into Asana or ClickUp, at the very least don't attempt a migration during a busy season.

Publer: My Most-Used AppSumo Deal

Publer might be the AppSumo deal I've used more than any other purchase in the past couple of years. It's a social media management and scheduling tool that connects to Facebook, Facebook Groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

What makes it especially useful is the RSS feed manager they recently added. It automatically imports your latest blog posts and lets you either auto-publish them to your social networks or approve them before they go out. You can also compose directly in the editor, use the calendar view to plan ahead, and invite teammates to collaborate. For anyone producing regular content across multiple platforms, Publer removes a huge amount of friction from the distribution process.

Quuu, VideoPeel, and Viral Loops: Final Three Deals

Quuu is a content discovery tool designed to help fill your social media calendar with relevant posts. I've had mixed results with tools like this, and philosophically, I'm not a fan of sharing content just to meet a posting quota. That raises the noise floor on social media and makes genuinely interesting content harder to find. From a business model perspective, though, Quuu is clever: they charge people to promote content through Quuu Promote, and charge other people to discover content to share. Full circle.

VideoPeel lets you send clients a link where they can record video testimonials with a single click. Video testimonials absolutely drive sales, but the hard part was never the technology. It's that most people don't like being on camera. The tool won't solve that fundamental reluctance. Also worth noting: if your clients record on a laptop webcam instead of a smartphone, the video quality will be noticeably worse. That's not VideoPeel's fault, but it's a common complaint.

Viral Loops is a classic AppSumo deal that's been around for years. It lets you build referral programs modeled after successful campaigns like Dropbox's famous refer-a-friend program. It integrates with email providers like Klaviyo, HubSpot, and MailChimp, plus platforms like WordPress, Webflow, and Shopify. If you're looking for an affordable referral system, this is one of the more proven options out there.

How to Save the Most Money on AppSumo Black Friday

For the first time ever, AppSumo released an actual coupon code for Black Friday. Use BF2020 at checkout to save 10% when you spend at least $150. You don't need a Plus or Briefcase membership to use this code, which is a big deal since AppSumo has historically just brought back old deals at full price during Black Friday.

The Plus membership costs $100 per year and offers its own 10% discount, but since the coupon code gives you the same savings, signing up for Plus just for Black Friday doesn't make sense. Briefcase is a different calculation: you pay $150 every three months and get four vouchers worth $49 each. The catch is you can only apply one voucher per purchase. So if you're buying a lot of $49 deals, Briefcase is a great value. If you're buying fewer, higher-priced deals, the math gets less favorable.

Do a little arithmetic before committing to Briefcase. And regardless of which membership route you take, that BF2020 coupon code is free money on the table if you're spending $150 or more.

Watch the Full Video

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