Four kinds of “discount code sites”
Listing a discount code used to mean submitting it to coupon sites. In SaaS it now means four different channels, and they bring very different customers:
- SaaS deal marketplaces. Secret, FounderPass and NachoNacho collect startup offers from hundreds of vendors and sell or give access to founders. Buyers arrive with a clear intent: they're building their stack.
- Perk portals. Banks, card issuers, incorporation services and accelerators bundle partner offers as a feature for their own customers: Stripe Atlas, Mercury, Ramp, Brex, AWS Activate and accelerator deal books like Y Combinator's. You reach companies in their first weeks, often before they've picked a CRM or a help desk.
- Lifetime-deal marketplaces. AppSumo and its peers sell your product for a one-time price. Big cash, very different customer, separate decision (below).
- Consumer coupon sites and extensions. RetailMeNot-style sites and browser extensions like Honey. They mostly intercept people already at your checkout, so they rarely create demand.
Startup directories are a separate channel, covered in startup directories and our list of SaaS directories. Of the four channels above, the first two are where the growth is. Perk portals in particular are run by companies that keep the portal alive because it retains their own customers, which is why they outlast standalone deal sites.
What happened to the deal sites on the original list
This tactic first collected nine sites. Checked in November 2026, most of them are gone:
- catchin.io, deals.failory.com, startupdeals.tech and savewithloot.com no longer resolve. Failory itself is alive, but its deals section isn't.
- splitgenie.com is for sale on HugeDomains, and dealster.io is a parked domain on Sedo.
- martechbase.com is now a tool for auditing your marketing stack, with no deals section.
- milled.com is a search engine of 53 million+ e-commerce marketing emails. It shows retail promo codes, not SaaS deals. It's still a useful warning: a code you send by email can end up public.
- joinsecret.com is alive and bigger than ever, with 640+ deals and 500+ SaaS partners.
The lesson: small deal sites come and go every year or two. Spread your offer across platforms that have a business reason to stay alive, and keep a list of where each code lives so you can retire it.
What a listing actually brings
Signups from companies that are buying right now. A founder browsing a perk portal in their first month is choosing tools, not researching. That's the main value, and why credits or a free first year (HubSpot's 90% off, Notion's free months, Intercom's credits) beat a 10% code.
Brand searches you don't control. Deal pages are built for search. Secret's page for HubSpot is titled “HubSpot Promo Code: 90% off the Professional and Enterprise plans for 1 year”, and its Notion and Intercom pages follow the same pattern. Searches like “semrush coupon code 2026”, “canva promo code october 2026” and “notion discount code reddit” show that buyers look for a code right before paying. If you have no offer and no page, the result is a list of expired codes on someone else's site.
Distribution through partners. Secret also lets VCs, accelerators and communities embed its whole deal catalog, so one listing can surface in many white-labeled perk pages you'll never see directly.
Links and mentions, as a side effect. Treat any SEO value as a bonus, not the reason to list.
Own your “{brand} coupon” search
People who search “{your brand} promo code” are at your checkout already. If they leave to hunt for a code, some don't come back, and some come back with a coupon extension that claims the sale.
Publish an official promo page instead: /promo, /coupons or /deals. Hostinger does this well. Its page is titled “Official Hostinger coupon codes | 85% off (November 2026)”, lists current offers with the coupon already applied at checkout, and explains how to redeem them. The dated title matches how people search (“canva promo code october 2026”), so update it every month.
You don't need a deep discount for the page to work. List what's really available: the annual-plan discount, the startup program, education or nonprofit pricing, and the perk portals where qualified buyers get more. Saying “there's no public code right now, here's how to save” still keeps the buyer on your site, and you decide which offer they see. Link it from your pricing page FAQ and footer so it gets crawled.
Lifetime deals are a different bet
A lifetime deal on AppSumo is not a discount code. You trade all future revenue from a customer for a one-time payment, and the platform keeps a large share of it. AppSumo's own terms today: you keep 70% of sales from buyers it brings and 95% from buyers you bring, payouts arrive 60 days after each month to cover a 60-day refund window, and about 10% of applicants get in.
Project.co's 2019 campaign shows the shape of it. $93,884 in gross sales became $28,165 for the company under that year's split; 1,431 paid accounts came in, 764 codes were refunded, and the team handled 1,700+ support conversations, often 70 a day at launch.
It can work for a young product that needs cash, feedback and reviews fast, and has low per-user costs. It works badly for products with heavy support, AI or infrastructure costs per user, or a sales-led motion: those lifetime users stay on your servers and in your inbox for years.
The risks, and how to contain them
- Training customers to wait. If a code is always one search away, nobody pays list price. Keep public offers for new customers and for specific segments, never as a standing discount on every plan.
- Margin. A 90% first-year discount is a customer acquisition cost. Price it like one: know what a discounted cohort converts to in year two before you scale it.
- Code leakage. Codes posted on one site get scraped by others and by browser extensions. In December 2024 YouTuber MegaLag showed that Honey swapped affiliate cookies at checkout to claim last-click credit and let merchants choose which codes its users saw; creators sued PayPal in several class actions.
- Broken attribution. Last-click tools credit whichever code or extension touched the checkout last, not the partner that found the customer.
The fix is in your billing setup. Stripe promotion codes can be limited to first-time customers, a minimum spend, an expiry date, a set number of redemptions or a specific customer. Give each platform its own code, cap it, and check redemptions by code every month.
