My Black Friday LTD Haul: GridPane, BuddyBoss & More
A look at the four lifetime deals Dave picked up during Black Friday week, including his most expensive LTD purchase ever and a secret deal that almost slipped by.
Black Friday Deal Overload
Black Friday and Cyber Monday week is absolute chaos for anyone in the lifetime deal space. Hundreds of offers flood in, and keeping track of them all becomes a job in itself. That LTD Life had an index of over 150 deals at the time, sortable by category with expiration dates and coupon codes — a lifesaver when the FOMO hits hard.
But rather than just listing deals, this is about what actually made the cut. Out of all those offers, four purchases stood out — each for a very specific reason. Some were no-brainers, one was a gut-wrenching spend, and another felt like outright theft. Here's the breakdown.
GridPane: The Most Expensive LTD Ever
GridPane took the crown as the most expensive lifetime deal purchase Dave has ever made. The developer plan — the "big daddy" option — was the pick, and it wasn't cheap. But the math made it impossible to ignore: it would pay for itself inside of a year, no question.
The reasoning comes down to agency economics. Dave's digital marketing agency builds and hosts WordPress sites for small brands and businesses. At the time, hosting sat with Cloudways, which worked well for non-WordPress projects. But for WordPress specifically, GridPane offered a way to cut hosting costs roughly in half by connecting directly to infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services. The plan was to pair GridPane with a $5,000 AWS credit from Startups.com, potentially covering hosting costs for a couple of years.
Beyond cost savings, GridPane's existing feature set was strong, and the roadmap looked promising. It was one of those deals where the price tag stings on day one but the ROI is so clear that hesitation doesn't make sense. The one catch: at the time, the pre-Black Friday pricing required an existing GridPane account (even a free trial), though it was set to open to everyone on Black Friday itself.
Advanced Custom Fields Pro: The Deal That Felt Like Stealing
After the GridPane purchase, Advanced Custom Fields Pro felt like pocket change. ACF is one of the most widely-used WordPress plugins out there — if you've worked on WordPress sites, you've almost certainly encountered it. The Pro version unlocks additional field types and features that serious developers rely on daily.
The developer pack offered unlimited sites for $100 AUD — but with a 25% Black Friday discount and the favorable currency conversion from Australian to US dollars, the final price landed at roughly $52. Unlimited sites, lifetime license, for fifty-two bucks. That's the kind of deal that makes you double-check the checkout page.
Here's the kicker: Advanced Custom Fields announced they were killing lifetime deals entirely starting January 2020, switching to annual pricing at similar rates. So that $52 one-time payment would have become a recurring annual expense. For any WordPress developer, this was a now-or-never situation.
Pionet Addons for Elementor: One Killer Feature
Dave's agency already ran two Elementor addon packs — Ultimate Addons from Brainstorm Force (bundled with the Astra agency plan) and Essential Addons from the WP Developer team (an AppSumo deal). Between those two, additional Elementor addons rarely felt necessary.
Pionet changed that equation with a single feature: its form builder. Elementor Pro includes a form builder, sure, but Pionet's implementation takes things to another level. We're talking fully customizable multi-step forms built and styled entirely within Elementor — things like interactive product selectors with dropdown menus, visual choices, and conditional logic. The pizza ordering example on their site showed the kind of complexity that would normally require a dedicated form plugin or custom development.
At $60 for unlimited sites (down from the usual $200 lifetime price), it was another no-brainer. Even if the form builder was the only feature you ever touched, that price point more than justified itself. The fact that it came with additional Elementor widgets and functionality was just a bonus.
BuddyBoss: The Secret Lifetime Deal
The last purchase was both the most debated and the most exciting. BuddyBoss — a WordPress-based community platform — dropped a secret lifetime deal through a Facebook group, available for just 72 hours. Dave pulled the trigger, though not without some internal back-and-forth.
BuddyBoss lets you add a full online community to your WordPress site, similar in concept to Tribe (which was on AppSumo at the time). The critical difference is self-hosting. With BuddyBoss running on your own WordPress installation, you hold the keys. If the company pivots, gets acquired, or slows development, you still have your community data, your codebase, and the ability to roll back to a stable version.
That self-hosting advantage is a big deal for community and learning management platforms specifically. SaaS tools in startup mode carry inherent risk — founders move on, companies get sold, bugs go unpatched. With a WordPress-based solution, you're the system administrator. You control updates, rollbacks, and data. For anyone building a community or membership site as a core part of their business, that level of control matters enormously.
The Bottom Line on This Year's Haul
Four purchases, one very sore wallet. GridPane and BuddyBoss represented the heavy hitters in terms of price, while ACF Pro and Pionet were the kind of deals that make Black Friday week worth paying attention to. Every one of these tools addressed a specific, practical need for the agency — cheaper hosting, better WordPress development tools, more powerful forms, and self-hosted community infrastructure.
The common thread across all four deals is long-term value. None of these were impulse buys or shiny-object syndrome purchases. Each one either replaces an ongoing expense or adds a capability that would cost significantly more at regular pricing. That's the sweet spot for lifetime deals: when the tool solves a real problem and the math clearly works in your favor.
Watch the Full Video
Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.
