Dear Frontly Community,

This is Patrick, Frontly's founder and CEO.

It’s been almost two years since we sold our first lifetime deal, and I want to take this opportunity to provide a full company update to everyone who has supported us so far in our journey.

Considering all the lifetime deal horror stories out there, I want to start by addressing Frontly’s financial position and our plans for the coming months and years.

Unlike most companies offering lifetime deals, Frontly started by raising 250,000 USD in funding from some local investors in 2022, before we ran any deals. Over the past 1.5 years of selling lifetime deals, we’ve generated another several hundred thousand dollars of revenue.

Frontly has a small team of 3 Canadians and one Philippine support agent. We pay ourselves modest living wages, so our monthly expenses are pretty low, relatively. Aside from payroll, our other main expense is hosting the platform, which is also relatively affordable and only scales marginally per user.

Despite focusing mostly on selling lifetime deals, we have been building monthly recurring revenue for the past 6 months. Currently our MRR covers the costs of hosting the platform entirely with some extra on top for other expenses.

In summary, Frontly is in a strong financial position with a long runway, and there should be no concerns about the platform shutting down at any time in the near or long-term future.

After spending years building this passionate community, even if some day there is a change such as a sale of the business or other circumstance, my personal goal would always be to ensure that any early supporters are left in a good situation.

While we would love to maximize monthly recurring revenue, we understand there is a large market of hobbyists and small businesses who are sick of paying subscription fees. We’ve found that users would rather pay a $499 up-front LTD than pay even $20 per month.

Right now, this offer allows us to move faster, and even capture market share from our close competitors who have similar platforms but don’t offer lifetime deals. Of course, we believe Frontly has a lot of special aspects that make it unique and superior to other platforms, but having a lifetime deal sure does not hurt.

Mathematically, I believe they actually are. For any given group of buyers, there is a predictable distribution of usage per-user, ranging from almost no usage to a significant level of usage. The heavy-usage customers cost us more, but the low-usage users more than make up for them.

Even if all our revenue was subscription-based, these customers can churn, and in the end selling LTDs is a faster way to generate up-front cash to fund the development of the business today, which will allow us to grow even faster, build a much better product, and create a lasting company.

We respect that early buyers of our lifetime deal are special, and we want to make sure that it’s clear how being an early supporter benefits you compared to being a brand-new buyer today or in the future.

To take advantage of the LTD model while making it more sustainable for us long-term, we are making the following changes in the near future to all new lifetime deal purchases moving forward:

Most likely, we will stop offering lifetime deals entirely in the next 12-18 months. There’s no guarantee of this because we’re always responding to the market in real-time, but right now we think we’ll use the LTD model to move really quickly and continue building a passionate base of users and large thriving community, and once we streamline our sales and marketing strategies, we will be able to move to a pure monthly subscription model.

In August 2024, we welcomed Scott Spanier to the Frontly team as co-founder and head of sales. While I (Patrick) built Frontly from the start and handle the technical side of the business, I openly admit that I’m not really a sales or marketing person.

Frontly’s lifetime deal strategy worked really well to create growth for a solo technical founder, allowing me to focus entirely on product and not bother with outbound sales or marketing.

As Frontly aims to mature into a lasting brand, we’re taking an important step to create sustainable revenue by hiring Scott to lead a new sales strategy.

Our plan is simple: Moving forward, lifetime deals will be like the ‘starter plan’ and will cover the needs of most users, while offering custom enterprise pricing for companies who need significantly higher limits, custom branding, direct team support, onboarding and a dedicated account manager.

Frontly has evolved a lot over the past three years. As the CEO, my vision is crystalizing and I can summarize it fairly concisely:

Frontly’s goal is to be the easiest no-code app builder in the world, while still offering sophisticated features and powering the next generation of modern applications, including AI applications.

So far, Frontly has been mostly focused on powering internal tools and using Google Sheets as a data source. As we move forward and expand our data sources to offer robust databases, we are also looking at how Frontly can power the next generation of SaaS applications.

With every new feature, we endeavor to unlock new use-cases. If you want to help shape the vision, become an active member of our Discord community!

We have several exciting updates planned for the coming months, including an all-new upgraded Form system, an improved Booking / Scheduling system, integrated Payments, and lots of new useful AI features that enhance your apps and streamline the app-building experience.

We're also working to improve security and we have a goal of achieving GDPR compliance in the near future.

Now that you know more about Frontly’s current situation, I ask that if you believe in Frontly’s vision and love our product, please help spread the word.

Share our LTD offer in any communities you’re in, with friends and colleagues who could make use of Frontly’s no-code app builder. Help us create more awareness in the no-code market and lifetime deal communities.

Particularly if you know users who are currently on other no-code platforms who might be interested in Frontly's lifetime deal offering, that would be very helpful.

We have a generous affiliate program allowing you to earn a significant commission if you refer paid users to our platform. You can sign up here to get your own referral link: https://referrals.frontly.ai/signup

We sincerely appreciate any help you can provide spreading the word about our platform.

Thanks for all your support.

It means the world to us!

Patrick Kelly,

CEO @ Frontly