What sellers actually keep: the published revenue splits across lifetime-deal marketplaces

Our refund-window comparison looked at marketplace economics from the buyer’s side. There is a second ledger worth reading, because it predicts which deals survive: the seller split. A marketplace that keeps a third of every sale needs each vendor to charge more; a marketplace that keeps 5% can let vendors price thinner. Those economics end up on the buyer’s side of the counter eventually. Here are the splits the platforms actually publish as of October 2026 — checked against their own pages, not third-party summaries.

The published splits, side by side

The quotes behind each figure

AppSumo. The Getting Paid page is more generous to sellers than its reputation suggests: “Earn 95% of revenue from new buyers you bring to AppSumo—all the profit, minus a small 5% processing fee. Earn 70% of revenue from returning AppSumo customers we bring to you.” The catch is the second number: once a buyer is AppSumo’s, the negotiated share — potentially well below 70% on curated campaigns — applies forever. The payment policy also nets out the 10% AppSumo Plus discount and every refund before your percentage is computed, and pays Net-60 end-of-month. For a category where 1-star reviews cluster around products dying within a year, that delayed payout is also a seller-side risk signal worth reading.

PitchGround. Two contracts, two results. The partner guide: “The revenue split for Featured Deals is 60-40, where 60% of the revenue goes to PitchGround, and 40% of the revenue goes to you. From this 60%, PitchGround pays out affiliate commission, runs paid ads campaigns, and delivers all of the sales pages, video production, and other media.” The marketplace terms: “70% of the revenue from each sale goes to you. 30% of the revenue from each sale goes to PitchGround.” The featured route buys you a managed campaign at the cost of your majority stake; the self-serve route matches RocketHub’s numbers with a 60-day refund window attached.

RocketHub. Plainly stated in the marketplace FAQ: “As the listing product owner, you will get 70% of all net sales of your product (sales after refunds and other discounts).” Note the minimum: “you must list your product for a minimum of 90 days”, paid quarterly, with a 30-day refund window on every deal — the same buyer-protection figure as Dealify and DealMirror’s member rates. RocketHub pairs these terms with the weakest Trustpilot presence of the group — no established rating profile at the time of writing.

The unpublished four. Dealify’s seller page promises “the biggest ‘piece of the pie’ is for you” without a number in sight; DealMirror asks nothing up front but publishes no split either. Neither StackSocial nor DealFuel currently show seller terms at all. None of this is improper — negotiated revenue share is the norm across the industry — but a seller signing up on vibes alone is negotiating blind against the platform’s own commission table.

How the split connects to what buyers pay

The arithmetic is simple and everyone in the chain applies it. On PitchGround’s featured track, a vendor keeping 40% needs a product price roughly 2.5× higher just to match the cash they would keep at AppSumo’s 95% rate — 100 ÷ 40 = 2.5. That is not inherently bad: the featured split funds real marketing spend (ads, video, sales pages) that a solo builder cannot buy on their own, and a well-run campaign can outsell a cheaper listing. But when you see a lifetime price of £299 on a managed campaign, the vendor is pricing to the split. Splits in one hand, refund windows in the other: a deal sitting on the worst of both — the deepest platform cut combined with the shortest published window — is the one priced for the platform’s margin rather than the product’s survival.

Why sellers with better splits still undercut retail by 80–95%

The headline discounts survive because the seller’s alternative to a split is a customer-acquisition bill instead. A 5% processing fee on an AppSumo self-listing buys the marketplace’s audience — and at the time of writing that audience has left a 3.6/5 Trustpilot score across 1,518 reviews, with roughly 19% of reviewers at 1 star and 75% at 5 stars (distribution read directly from Trustpilot’s rating bars). Compare the room: PitchGround 4.3 (446 reviews), Dealify 4.2 (530), DealFuel 4.2 (121), DealMirror 4.1 (383), StackSocial 4.7 (11,445). The bigger the platform’s audience and the lower the split, the more leverage exists at the point where a founder must decide between reach and margin.

Use these numbers as a buyer the same way you use the refund window: check what the marketplace keeps on any deal you are sizing up, then read our break-even maths against the vendor’s own subscription to see whether the licence earns its keep. Both ledgers are linked — cheap software with a starved vendor does not live long, and we keep the proof in the Graveyard.