If you are in the marketing or creative fields, I guess you’d have come across many LTDs – Limited Time Deals. Products and Services that presumably cost multiples of tens of dollars per month are released for a one time (low) price of $29, $39, $49 USD, or whatever number catches their fancy. The catch? They are available at a low price for a short period – usually a few hours to a few days.
As a victim of quite a few of these LTDs, I can give you only one suggestion – DON’T fall for them.
Most of these LTD’s are not even worth their one=time price. The products/services are so shoddy and full of bugs. Just try contacting their support to get a problem resolved – it’s a hopeless experience.
Once you buy from one of them, instead of support emails, they start bombarding you with sales emails – with equally hopeless products that they are affiliated with. A few over=clever ones even use their support email for sales purposes, hoping you’ll open it and click on their links. You can, however, learn 1001 creative ways of trying to make people open emails and how to write a copy designed to scam others.
In the few instances where the support did work, and the product/service also seemed to work, I ended up never using them. That’s because deals are never for the products you need. They’re always for products that the creators want to thrust on you.
Naively, I kept buying products and services that I thought would help me with business development now or in the near future. That has never happened.
Have you noticed that these LTD service providers don’t even have a comments section on their landing pages? Except for a few established platforms like AppSumo, none of them encourage user comments and that’s not by accident. If there was one, you’ll never buy.
After buying a number of LTDs over a couple of years, and taking a serious hit on my bank balance, I have finally decided NOT to buy any LTDs from anyone. The mails keep coming, but I have now developed the strength NOT TO OPEN any of them.
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales approaching, I hope you’ll take the right decision as well. If at all you want to buy something, buy it at its full price so that you’ll actually end up using it. Otherwise, select the products that you would like to buy beforehand and wait till they go on a deal.
Don’t ever buy an LTD based on your ‘whim’ or their ‘copy’. That’s your weakness that they would gladly keep exploiting until you put a full stop. I hope that moment arrives faster for you – before you waste a lot of $$$.