AppSumo Deals Roundup: Tarvent, Xnapper, Persona Music & ViewFlip

What's in This AppSumo Roundup

Every week brings a fresh batch of lifetime deals on AppSumo, and sorting the genuine bargains from the overpriced experiments is a full-time job. This roundup covers four deals that hit the marketplace in early September 2024: Tarvent (marketing automation), Xnapper (Mac screenshot tool), Persona Music (royalty-free music library), and ViewFlip (remote collaboration).

Each deal gets an honest score, a breakdown of who it's actually for, and a look at what real buyers are saying in the comments. If you're short on time, this is everything you need to make a smart purchasing decision without watching four separate full-length reviews.

Tarvent Review: Powerful Marketing Automation That Needs Polish

Tarvent is a marketing automation platform that handles email campaigns, scheduling, trigger-based workflows, landing pages, and surveys. On paper, it's gunning for the Active Campaign tier of the market — and at lifetime deal pricing, that would be a steal if it delivered.

What stands out are the thoughtful touches you don't find elsewhere. There's a built-in broken link checker that scans your email the moment you click the link button, saving you from sending campaigns with dead URLs. There's also a standard operating procedure checklist that validates your email is ready to send and unlikely to hit the spam folder — essentially a built-in version of what you'd get from a service like Mail Tester.

The trouble is everything surrounding those nice features. The interface feels developer-oriented rather than user-friendly. It's slow, littered with loading screens, and some features simply didn't work during testing. At its current pricing, several commenters pointed out that Tarvent feels expensive compared to the competition, and that's a fair criticism for a tool that hasn't yet nailed the user experience it's charging premium rates for.

If you're looking for a solid email marketing lifetime deal right now, SendFox remains the better value — it's built by the AppSumo team, which means long-term support is essentially guaranteed. Tarvent earned a 5.7 out of 10. It's one to watch rather than one to deploy in production today.

Xnapper: The $5 Mac Screenshot Tool That Sparked a Debate

Xnapper was AppSumo's big $5 deal of the week, and it immediately divided the community. The tool itself is a Mac-only screenshot utility that goes well beyond what macOS offers natively. You can drop beautiful backgrounds behind screenshots, annotate with marketing-friendly arrows, and even perform FBI-style redaction — either manually by clicking on individual words, or automatically using machine learning to detect and blur sensitive information like IP addresses and passwords.

The Mac exclusivity frustrated a lot of Windows users in the comments, but here's the reality: tools like Xnapper exist on Mac because Apple provides powerful APIs for screenshot capture and background separation right at the operating system level. Building something comparable on Windows would require an enormous amount of work, which is why no true equivalent exists there. The closest suggestion anyone offered was Snagit, which handles screenshots but lacks Xnapper's styling and redaction capabilities. CleanShot X is the other Mac competitor worth knowing about — both tools are available on Setapp — but at $5, Xnapper is hard to beat on value.

The other controversy was whether this qualifies as a "real" lifetime deal. You get permanent access to the current version with one year of updates. After that, updates require a separate purchase at a 40% discount. Technically the deal terms were clearly stated and nobody was misled, but it did rub some buyers the wrong way. Practically speaking, a screenshot tool isn't likely to break with future macOS updates, so the version you buy today should remain functional for years.

Despite the grumbling, plenty of buyers were happy — many grabbed two codes. The deal is code-limited, so it may be sold out by the time you read this, but it's worth checking.

Persona Music: High-Quality Royalty-Free Tracks at a Fraction of the Cost

Music licensing is notoriously expensive. A single high-quality track can cost a significant chunk of a content creator's budget, and subscription services like Epidemic Sound run at least $10 per month ($120/year) for their lowest plan. Persona Music offers lifetime access to a royalty-free music library starting at just $29 — making it one of the more compelling value propositions in this roundup for anyone producing podcasts, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams.

The music quality genuinely surprised during testing. These aren't the generic stock tracks you've heard recycled across thousands of YouTube videos. The library includes legitimately good music that you'd feel confident dropping into professional content. Their catalog apparently even includes tracks that have had actual radio play, which speaks to the caliber of what they've curated.

The weak spots are all on the technical side. Adding a second user to your account requires emailing support to get a manual code — there's no self-service option. The search works but behaves differently from what you'd expect if you've used other music platforms. The AI search feature is limited to 10 queries per day and locked behind the highest tier ($149), and it didn't prove meaningfully better than the standard search anyway.

The sound effects library, available on tier three, is worth mentioning. It took some troubleshooting to access — Safari had loading issues that Chrome didn't — but the library itself is well-organized across roughly 75 playlists covering everything from ambient sounds to UI effects. The quality matches the music library, and the collection avoids the overused stock sounds you'll find on other platforms. Persona Music earned a 6.6 out of 10, dragged down by technical issues, but if audio quality is what matters most to you, the score probably deserves a mental bump.

ViewFlip Review: Simple, Reliable Remote Collaboration

ViewFlip is a remote collaboration and tech support tool in the vein of TeamViewer. Install the software on both machines — Mac, Windows, or a mix of both — and you can request screen access, take control, and troubleshoot with integrated voice chat. It's straightforward, and that simplicity is its strength.

The setup is what you'd expect: install on both ends, log in, request access, get approval, and you're controlling the remote screen with a live voice conversation. It handles the cross-platform use case well, which is genuinely useful if you're supporting family members or clients who aren't on the same operating system as you.

There are two limitations worth knowing about. First, there's no unattended access mode — you can't whitelist trusted users to connect to your machine without someone physically granting permission each time. Tools like Screens for Mac offer this, and it would be a welcome addition for anyone managing multiple machines. Second, there's noticeable lag when controlling the remote screen. It's perfectly fine for walking someone through a tech support issue or collaborating on a document, but you wouldn't want to do detailed design work or anything requiring precision through ViewFlip.

For what it promises, ViewFlip delivers. It's a clean, functional tool at a fair lifetime deal price. It earned a 7.9 out of 10 — the highest score in this roundup.

Which Deals Are Worth Buying?

Here's the quick breakdown if you're deciding where to spend your money. ViewFlip (7.9/10) is the safest buy — it does exactly what it says and does it well. Persona Music (6.6/10) is a strong pick for content creators who want to ditch their monthly music subscription, as long as you can tolerate some rough edges on the platform. Xnapper is a no-brainer at $5 if you're on a Mac and it's still in stock. Tarvent (5.7/10) is the riskiest bet — it has potential but needs significant refinement before it's ready for production use.

Full-length reviews for each of these tools are available on the channel if you want the deep dive before making a decision. And if you're shopping on AppSumo, using the links below helps support this type of independent, honest review content.

Watch the Full Video

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