AppSumo Deals Roundup: October 8, 2024 — What's Worth Buying?

This Week's AppSumo Lineup

Welcome to another Taco Truck Roundup — the series where full-length lifetime deal reviews get condensed into quick, digestible summaries so you can decide what's worth your money without watching a 30-minute deep dive.

This week we've got four tools on the chopping block: Signum.ai for trend monitoring and LinkedIn tracking, VideoToPage for converting videos into blog posts, Hopper HQ for social media scheduling, and Butternut AI for building websites with artificial intelligence. Let's get into it.

Signum.ai — Trend Monitoring That Falls Short

Signum.ai bundles two seemingly unrelated features into one tool: internet trend monitoring (think Exploding Topics) and LinkedIn profile tracking. The idea is you can spot emerging trends and get notified when a prospect updates their LinkedIn profile — useful for sales outreach and hiring.

The trend monitoring side is underwhelming. You get a handful of trending topics with basic line graphs and a couple of paragraphs of description. Their weekly report only adds two or three new trends, and you can get similar (arguably better) data from Exploding Topics' free tier. Nothing here justifies a purchase on its own.

The LinkedIn tracking is where the real potential lies — follow a prospect or candidate, and get notified when they change roles or update their profile. But here's the fatal flaw: Signum only checks LinkedIn profiles once per week, on Mondays. Even after manually updating a LinkedIn profile and waiting for the weekly scan, the tool failed to detect the changes. The scan ran (the timestamp confirmed it), but no notification came through and the old data persisted.

Commenters echoed this frustration. As one viewer put it: "Once a week tracking is simply not good enough. Opportunity would have flown by by the time the update comes in." With broken detection and glacially slow update cycles, Signum earned a 2.7 out of 10. It's hard to recommend a monitoring tool that doesn't reliably monitor anything.

VideoToPage — Turning Videos into Blog Posts the Right Way

VideoToPage is an AI-powered tool that takes any video or audio file and converts it into written content — blog posts, SOPs, course materials, you name it. Upload a file or grab one from YouTube, and the tool breaks it down into sections, generates written content, and even pulls screenshots from the video automatically.

What sets VideoToPage apart is its template system. Most AI content tools require heavy prompting to get decent results, but VideoToPage's templates are well-designed enough that you can get quality output with minimal intervention. For those who want more control, you can apply custom prompts at the individual section level, giving you granular control over how each part of your video translates to text.

The pricing model is a standout feature as well. Plans are based on transcription time rather than the number of articles generated, which is a much fairer approach. If you're working with lots of shorter videos, a per-article limit would burn through your allocation quickly, but time-based pricing lets you maximize output. There are also direct integrations with WordPress and Notion for seamless publishing.

One caveat worth noting: translation to other languages works, but there's a specific language setting buried in the tool that needs to be changed manually. Using the built-in AI chat to request a translation won't automatically update that setting, which can result in French headlines with English body text. A minor UX issue, but once you know the workaround it's smooth sailing. Some commenters pointed out that Google NotebookLM can do something similar for free, and while that's partially true, NotebookLM is designed for research — it lacks the screenshot generation, CMS integrations, and content length that VideoToPage offers.

Hopper HQ — Solid Social Media Scheduling with a Few Rough Edges

Hopper HQ is a social media management platform with a built-in link-in-bio page builder. You can connect Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube, then schedule posts across all of them from a single dashboard. The link-in-bio feature lets you create a custom landing page for your important links — potentially replacing both a Buffer subscription and a Linktree subscription with one AppSumo purchase.

Overall functionality is strong. Scheduling a Facebook post worked flawlessly, going out exactly when planned. The interface still has room for improvement in terms of user experience, but the core features deliver on their promise. Support was notably responsive — when a bug prevented creating a link-in-bio page during the review, their team responded and fixed the issue within 30 to 40 minutes, all while the video was still being recorded.

The rough edges show up in the analytics department. Facebook analytics only partially loaded, with half the sections throwing errors. Instagram analytics worked fine in the same sections, suggesting Facebook-specific data was either broken or not fully built out. Hopper later confirmed that certain Facebook analytics are no longer available from Facebook's API and would be removed, but days later the broken sections were still visible in the dashboard — a small cleanup task that shouldn't take long.

The practical advice here: don't buy Hopper if you already own two or three social media tools that still work and meet your needs. Software is a commodity now, and stockpiling tools you'll never use isn't a strategy. But if you genuinely need social media scheduling and don't have a working solution, Hopper is a solid pick at a 7.2 out of 10.

Butternut AI — Big Promises, Rough Execution

Butternut AI promises to build you an entire website in 20 seconds, and technically it delivers on that claim. You type in a description, the AI generates a full site, and it's live in under half a minute. The problem is what you get probably isn't something you'd want to show anyone.

Buried beneath the flashy homepage builder are some genuinely interesting features that the sales page barely mentions. There's a full CMS with AI-powered blog post generation, though you have to add a blog archive page first before the blogging option even appears. There are basic SEO tools, Google Analytics integration, and — surprisingly — a chatbot that can be trained on your website's content and embedded right on the page for visitor interaction. These hidden features are more compelling than the core website builder itself.

The customization limitations are where things really fall apart. You can add entire new sections to your site, but you can't add a simple element like a photo to an existing section. It's an all-or-nothing approach to page editing that feels more like working around the tool than with it. Page load speeds were also poor, scoring badly on PageSpeed Insights despite serving what should be simple, static content with no dynamic data.

One commenter found a creative workaround: using Butternut as a design mockup tool rather than a production website builder, generating quick wireframes with color for client presentations and then rebuilding properly. That's a clever use case, but it's not what most buyers are paying for. The concept of AI-generated websites is exciting and inevitable, but Butternut isn't the tool that's going to get us there — at least not yet. Final score: 5.3 out of 10.

The Bottom Line on This Week's Deals

This week's roundup had a clear standout and a clear dud. VideoToPage impressed with its practical template system, time-based pricing, and genuine utility for content creators turning video libraries into written content. Hopper HQ landed as a reliable social media scheduler with responsive support, earning a respectable 7.2 despite some analytics hiccups.

On the other end, Signum.ai's once-per-week LinkedIn tracking that doesn't even detect changes makes it nearly impossible to recommend at a 2.7. Butternut AI has some interesting ideas hiding under the hood, but the execution isn't there yet at 5.3. If you're only going to grab one deal this week, VideoToPage is the one to look at — especially if you're sitting on a library of video content waiting to be repurposed.

Watch the Full Video

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