AppSumo Select vs LaunchPad vs Radar: Who Is Actually Covered

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Short answer: AppSumo sells under four protection labels plus a fifth listing that carries none, and the lines under the buy button tell you which you are in. On Select, a buyer with no membership recovers 50 percent in credits if AppSumo announces the closure inside 12 months. On LaunchPad that same buyer recovers nothing, because those closures are covered for Plus members only. On Radar, nobody is covered. We read the buy box on 21 live listings on 17 September 2026 and 12 were LaunchPad.

That is the decision most reviews skip. We earn a commission through our AppSumo link, which is exactly why the useful thing we can do is show you where the protection you think you have is zero.

The four labels, and what each one pays

The We Got Your Back guarantee, last updated 31 August 2026, splits the catalogue into Select, LaunchPad and Radar, plus Plus Exclusives, an access restriction rather than a vetting tier, covered as Select. Here is what it promises when a tool closes, after the refund window has passed.

• Select. Plus members get 100 percent of the price in AppSumo Credits if the closure falls inside their Coverage Period. Non members get 50 percent, and only within 12 months of purchase.
• LaunchPad. Products AppSumo calls "lightly vetted for accuracy and confirmed to work for early users," with real sales seen before listing. Plus members get 100 percent inside the Coverage Period. Non members get, in the guarantee's words, "No AppSumo Credits will be available."
• Radar. Nothing, for anyone, once the refund window closes. AppSumo says these are "scanned for safety but have not gone through a full vetting process."
• Plus Exclusives. Covered as Select, and only purchasable by members anyway.

Credits are AppSumo Credits, which the guarantee states are "not exchangeable for cash." The best outcome here is store credit, not a refund.

What 21 live listings actually showed

We read the buy box on every listing reachable from the front of the catalogue on 17 September 2026: 21 URLs covering 20 products, two of them the same product, with 20 of the 21 resolving a tier in the page source. That is about 6 percent of the 349 the header claims, and not a random draw, so read it as what the storefront shows you first, not as the whole marketplace.

• 5 of 21 were Select, showing "Covered by our We Got Your Back guarantee" plus "Carefully selected by AppSumo for quality, performance, and support."
• 12 of 21 were LaunchPad, showing "Plus members are covered by our We Got Your Back guarantee" plus "Chosen by AppSumo for their potential and innovation."
• 2 of 21 were Plus Exclusives, showing the covered line plus "Available exclusively to AppSumo Plus members."
• 2 of 21 showed no guarantee line at all. Both point at TidyCal, AppSumo's own product, which carries "Created and developed by AppSumo for entrepreneurs everywhere."

The printed label matched the underlying listing type every time the type resolved. That is the finding we did not expect: AppSumo is not hiding the tier. It states it at the point of sale, in one short sentence, on 19 of the 21. The three words that take a non member from 50 percent to zero are "Plus members are," and they are printed right there.

What is missing is the consequence. Nothing on the listing tells a non member that "Plus members are covered" means they get nothing; you have to open a separate help page. The plain "Covered by our We Got Your Back guarantee" line does the same in miniature: on Select, a non member is covered for half the price, and the line does not say so.

The unlabelled listings are their own small gap. The guarantee says "each deal's sales page will specify whether or not it is eligible for our We Got Your Back guarantee," yet AppSumo's own first party product says neither way, and the payout table never mentions first party products at all. Check the buy box on any live deal before you read a single review.

Radar is blunt about it, and it lives somewhere else

Radar is not mixed into the main catalogue. It is a separate storefront, "a place to discover early-stage software, brought to you by the founders who built it," and none of our 21 listings were Radar. All 12 Radar listings we checked said so under the buy button: no guarantee, because "Radar is a discovery engine, we don't vet these products, so this guarantee doesn't apply."

That is more candid than this category usually manages. The box adds one more thing worth knowing: "AI skills are non-refundable once redeemed," a real exception to the 60 day refund buyers assume is universal.

The sentence AppSumo leaves off its own Plus page

Here is the gap, and it runs opposite to the usual story. The page selling Plus describes the guarantee like this: "If a Select tool closes within one year of purchase, Plus members get 100% back in credits." That contradicts the comparison table further down the same page, which gives Pro two years. And on a whole page count taken on 17 September 2026, the word LaunchPad does not appear once.

But LaunchPad is where membership is worth the most. On Select, Plus takes you from 50 percent to 100, a benefit worth half the price. On LaunchPad it takes you from nothing to everything, and LaunchPad was 12 of our 21 listings against Select's 5. AppSumo is underselling its strongest protection perk on the page built to sell it.

Two dates decide your payout, and cancelling guts one

Every purchase gets a Coverage Period fixed on the day you buy: 24 months if you held active Plus Pro Annual then, 12 months otherwise, including on Monthly and Annual. Upgrading later does not extend earlier purchases, and everything bought before 31 August 2026 sits at 12 months.

The second date is the Closure Date, the day AppSumo posts the announcement on the product page. Your payout tier is judged then; the purchase date only fixed how long the window runs. The guarantee is explicit: "a Customer who is a Non-Plus Customer on the Closure Date receives Non-Plus protection ... regardless of the purchase's Coverage Period."

Put those together. Buy a Select deal on Pro Annual, cancel Plus a year later, and have AppSumo announce the closure in month 18. You paid for 24 months of coverage and your payout is zero, because non member protection is 50 percent and only within 12 months of purchase. Keep Plus and the same closure pays 100 percent. On LaunchPad timing does not even matter: a non member gets nothing at month 10 or month 20. AppSumo discloses all of this under the heading "How membership changes affect your coverage." It just never prices it. And credits only reach you if you email [email protected] within 30 days of the announcement posted on that product's page.

Monthly, Annual and Pro: only one row differs

AppSumo's table lists three plans: Annual at 99 dollars a year, Monthly at 12 a month, Pro at 199 a year. Run the arithmetic on their figures.

• Monthly costs 144 dollars a year against Annual's 99, and it is the only plan that excludes the quarterly coupons. That is a 145 dollar swing, and the two plans are otherwise identical, including one year of coverage each.
• Pro costs exactly 100 dollars more than Annual, and on AppSumo's table every other row is identical. The only difference is coverage, two years instead of one. That extra 100 dollars buys months 13 through 24 of closure protection and nothing else, and it pays only if you are still a member when the announcement lands, so the real price of that second year is 199 dollars plus another year of Plus.

Is Plus worth buying purely as insurance?

Priced as insurance alone, Plus Annual at 99 dollars breaks even only if closures hand back 99 dollars of credit you would have spent at AppSumo anyway. On LaunchPad the recovery goes from zero to 100 percent, so 99 dollars of closures covers it. On Select the gain is only the extra 50 percent, so you would need 198 dollars of Select deals to die.

The missing number is how often deals actually close, and AppSumo publishes no closure rate on any page we read, so Plus cannot be justified as insurance from first party data. Buy it for the 10 percent discount and the coupons, which arrive as four 25 dollar codes at 90 day intervals and reach 100 dollars only if you buy four times a year. That is how AppSumo prices it: at an assumed 1,350 dollars of annual spend its calculator shows 135 dollars of discount plus 100 of coupons against the 99 dollar fee. The protection is a tiebreaker, not the case.

Weighing one deal instead? Our break-even math on lifetime deals versus subscriptions works the payback, the best lifetime SaaS deals is the shortlist we keep, and our LeadCart post mortem traces what happens when a tool dies.

The 30 second check before you buy

• Read the two lines under the buy button. "Covered by our We Got Your Back guarantee" means Select, or a Plus Exclusive if the line beneath reads "Available exclusively to AppSumo Plus members." Both pay the same. "Plus members are covered" means LaunchPad. "No guarantee" means Radar. No line means a first party product.
• If it says "Plus members are" and you are not a member, treat the price as unrecoverable once the refund window shuts. Would you still buy at that risk?
• Check the refund window on that deal page. The guarantee says most products are refundable for 60 days and treats the period as the one each product specifies, and Radar adds that AI skills are non-refundable once redeemed.
• If you hold Plus, do not let it lapse while you still own deals. Your status on the closure date is what pays.
• Do not buy Pro Annual for the coverage alone. AppSumo publishes no closure rate, so nobody can price year two, us included.

None of this makes lifetime deals a bad idea. It makes them a purchase with a label, and the label takes three seconds to read. Browse the catalogue with those two lines in view.

Agencies reselling these tools have a second problem the guarantee does not touch: whether you may put the software in front of clients under your own name. That is a licensing question, covered in our guide to white label SaaS for agencies. If you would rather stop assembling a stack out of deals, building and running one is the part we do through AI automation.