Changelog

Did you see it already? Our freshly designed and fully revamped documentation website is now live! After about a month in the making, we’re super excited to finally share it with our community.

We’ve made several improvements by tearing down the old site and rebuilding it from scratch with modern technology. The new site is also fully redesigned to align with our updated branding.

We’ll soon publish a blog post diving into the tech behind the build, but for now, here’s what you can start using right away:

Smarter & Real-Time Search

Search now feels instant—results load immediately and are much more accurate compared to the old system.

Restructured Categories

We re-triaged our documentation and restructured categories and guides to make content easier to discover and more relevant to what you’re looking for.

Please explore and let us know if you have suggestions for further improvements.

Ask AI

Every page now has quick-access options to:

1. Copy or view as Markdown
2. Open in ChatGPT or Claude

This lets you instantly use LLMs to ask specific questions about our documentation.

Improved Code Snippets

We’ve switched to an industry-standard renderer. From syntax highlighting to a one-click copy button, everything is optimized for a better Developer Experience (DX).

Dark Mode

Just like our Developer Dashboard, the documentation site now supports dark mode.

Click the toggle button in the bottom-left corner to switch between modes and enjoy the docs in your preferred style.

This week we are introducing a new feature, especially tailored for SaaS makers. When using the Overlay Mode of our Checkout, you’d often want to hook into the success callback to handle post-processing. In this UX flow, it often makes less sense to display the final success dialog from Checkout.

To address this, we’ve added an option to skip it. Simply head to Plans → Customization and enable the “Skip confirmation dialog after purchase” setting.

Once enabled, the dialog will be disabled by default for all overlay checkouts. Here’s a conceptual demo video showing how an application can hook into the success callback to show confettis and toast.

However, you can still use the show_confirmation_dialog parameter to control it on a case-by-case basis. For more details, please read our documentation here.

This week we are rolling out several Quality of Life improvements to our Developer Dashboard.

Charts and Controls are better on all screen sizes

We improved the responsiveness of charts and their controls to display better across different screen sizes.

They now adapt more intelligently to the available space, ensuring a smoother experience whether on desktop or smaller screens.

Previous and Next Button on all Sidebar Panes

During the rebranding we introduced next and previous buttons for some sidebar panes that accompany tables. These provide a great UX by letting you quickly navigate through different items without going back to the table view.

This week we’ve consolidated the feature by bringing the same navigation to all sidebar panes, making item browsing more consistent across the Dashboard.

Fixed Notification UI for New Developers

Freemius allows you to customize the notifications you receive as a seller. We noticed a regression where, for some new makers, accessing the customization page caused it to break in certain cases.

This edge case has now been fixed, ensuring a smooth notification setup experience for all makers.

Freemius Developer Dashboard allows you to easily create licenses for your potential customers manually. This helps in providing short-time access to potential buyers without requiring them to go through the entire Checkout or Trial process.

You can navigate to the Licenses page and then click the Create License button to get started.

However, we noticed a regression where even after entering an email address, the license was not being assigned to the customer. We have identified and fixed this issue.

Freemius supports redirecting the Hosted Checkout after a successful purchase. This enables immediate post-purchase handling for SaaS and apps when you prefer not to wait for webhooks and want to process data right away.

We discovered that redirects were not triggering for Free Trials. We’ve fixed the issue to ensure trials behave consistently with paid purchases.

Alongside the fix, the redirect now includes additional query parameters so you can branch your logic without extra API calls:

• action – One of purchase, license_update, payment_method_update, or trial, indicating the type of action performed.
• trial – For trials, either free or paid, describing the trial type.
• trial_ends_at – For trials, a YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS timestamp indicating when the trial ends.

We noticed a regression from our rebranding where some tables in our Developer Dashboard were not aligned properly. The difference was most visible in the actions column.

This has now been resolved.

Freemius has a powerful affiliate platform where we track sales made by affiliates and send updates to both the seller and the affiliate. These emails also hint at the tentative time when the affiliate payment will be cleared.

In general, we include a cooling-off period of 60 days to ensure that any payments associated with affiliates can be validated against potential refunds or disputes. This makes the platform more trustworthy for both sellers and affiliates.

However, we noticed that the previous copy was not fully clear and caused some confusion. It mentioned that the payout date was due to a “30-day refund policy of the product.” While that used to be correct long ago, makers now have the flexibility to customize refund policies. Regardless, the cooling-off period is there to properly process refunds and disputes.

To make this crystal clear, the email copy has now been updated to:
“We include a short cooling-off period so any refunds or disputes can be handled first.”

In the beginning of every month (payout cycle) Freemius sends automatic emails to our makers explaining the upcoming payout along with a copy of a pro-forma invoice.

This week we are rolling out a small but important update to the pro-forma invoice. We identified two issues: in some places the date/time was not properly formatted, and a negative - sign was incorrectly added to zero values.

Both issues have now been fixed, ensuring your invoices are cleaner and more accurate.

Our SDK Integration page from the Developer Dashboard allows you to configure various settings to tailor the Opt-In experience as per the behavior of your plugin.

One such option is to enter a redirection path that triggers after the plugin activation. When enabled, the SDK ensures the user is redirected to the specified URL after the Opt-In is completed.

However, we noticed a bug where makers could mistakenly enter the redirection URL in absolute form instead of relative form. This often happened when the full URL was copy-pasted directly from the browser without stripping the unnecessary parts. As a result, the SDK integration and Opt-In flow could break.

To fix this, we’ve now updated our UI to strictly accept only relative URLs for Opt-In redirection. This ensures consistency and prevents accidental misconfigurations.

Whenever someone buys your Freemius-powered product, Freemius automatically includes a link to the Customer Portal. This is especially useful for downloadable software where Freemius acts as the direct agent of fulfilment. Your customers can download the product and manage license information from a single place.

However, we understand that there are cases where, as a maker, you may not want links to the Customer Portal included. For example, in SaaS products this experience is often managed directly within the application. Similarly, for downloadables, some makers prefer to handle the portal experience themselves.

To support these scenarios, we’ve rolled out a new option under the Emails section of your product. Simply go to Emails → Customization and control whether post-purchase emails should contain the Customer Portal link or not.

To simplify the experience, this setting is turned off by default for SaaS products, while for downloadable products (such as apps or WordPress plugins/themes) it is turned on by default.

We’ve been working closely with the WordPress.org plugin review team to implement a new safeguard in our system that prevents accidental uploading of premium versions of a product to the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Freemius’ deployment mechanism automatically creates a free, wp.org-compliant version of your product whenever you upload the premium version’s zip file. Makers are then expected to upload that free version to the official repository. However, mistakes can happen—sometimes the premium file gets uploaded instead. This often results in wasted time and back-and-forth with the Plugin Review team.

To solve this, and based on the review team’s recommendation, we’ve implemented a gatekeeping mechanism. Our integration code now includes a unique snippet: if that snippet is present, WordPress.org will block the submission and notify the maker of the error immediately.

Meanwhile, Freemius’ deployment process automatically strips this snippet from the generated free version. This ensures that when the correct variant is uploaded, the submission proceeds smoothly without interruption.

Please note that no updates to the WP SDK are required for this rollout. We urge existing makers to immediately update the integration snippet as shown in the Developer Dashboard to take advantage of this feature.

This week we are releasing several UI/UX enhancements and bug fixes in our Developer Dashboard. Please find the details below:

Fixed alignment issue in the license table

We noticed an alignment glitch when bundle license icons were being displayed on the license page. We have fixed this and repositioned the icon after the plan name to ensure a consistent visual layout.

This UI provides a quick way to see the licenses generated from the purchase of bundles.

Fixed date-time values in tables

We noticed that some date-time values in certain tables were incorrectly converted into the wrong time zone before being displayed. This led to confusion when compared with data from the Sales Analytics page.

We have identified and deployed a fix. Now all dates in the Dashboard are consistently displayed in UTC timezone.

Improved code fences

We noticed a regression in the code fence components, especially in the dark mode theme.

This has now been fixed and code fences render properly in all modes. We also did a small triage and ensured that all code fences include a copy button, so you can easily copy-paste snippets.

This week we are rolling out some important improvements to the Developer Dashboard’s registration page.

We have introduced a mandatory question asking what the person wants to sell with Freemius. This gives us valuable insight into our new makers and ultimately enables us to provide them with better guidance and support.

We also added a direct link to the Customer Portal for potential buyers looking to access their purchases. Over time, we noticed that buyers sometimes confused the Developer Dashboard with their Customer Portal. This new link should help reduce confusion and improve the overall user experience on our platform.

Additionally, we’re now asking how the person heard about us to better understand which platforms are helping us reach new makers. This field is optional, as we don’t want to add unnecessary friction during sign-up.

If you’re a software maker looking to easily monetize your products, you can head straight to our Developer Dashboard.

This week we are releasing a milestone project. Freemius already had a solid payment recovery (dunning) experience where our system would automatically send emails to buyers when a subscription renewal failed. These emails included a link where the buyer could promptly update their credit card.

However, we wanted to elevate the experience by taking it several steps further:

1. Offer the same polished experience as our Checkout, making customers “feel at home” when updating their payment method.
2. Support switching payment gateways (e.g., between PayPal, Card, or iDEAL) within the same flow.
3. Allow makers to embed the payment recovery flow within their own website—just like our Checkout—boosting conversion rates by keeping buyers on a familiar, trusted brand domain instead of the Freemius subdomain.

Today, we’re excited to announce that all these improvements are now live.

Our new payment recovery flow presents a clear UI where buyers can seamlessly switch between various payment gateways. No additional configuration is required on your end.

Setting up custom recovery URL

From the Developer Dashboard → Plans → Customization page, you can now set a custom payment recovery URL.

When configured, our system will link to your URL, and the Checkout JS snippet will automatically trigger the recovery flow. More details are available in our documentation.

Note for the Checkout JS SDK

If you’re using the CDN method, simply ensure the script tag is included in the page, and everything else will work automatically.

<script src="https://checkout.freemius.com/js/v1/"></script>

If you’re using the @freemius/checkout npm package, please update to the latest version 1.3.0 and follow the instructions in our GitHub repository.

This week we did a small overhaul to our WordPress SDK integration page available from our Developer Dashboard. The SDK integration page provides a very thorough step-by-step guide helping you integrate your WordPress products with our official SDK.

While evaluating and QAing the page — and also while going through support tickets — we noticed a few gaps for new makers. For example, before integrating, it’s possible that the maker has already created paid plans. In this case, the maker would need to create a license to follow through the integration process.

To make it as easy as possible, we have enhanced the page so that you get all the information without even leaving it.

For the case explained above, the page will now show a dedicated button at the relevant step to create a license for the activation screen.

Once you click to generate the license, it will now be displayed right on the page so you can copy it and activate your test product.

Several other improvements have also been applied to make the integration steps as seamless as possible, depending on your product’s exact configuration.

We hope these changes help you launch your product faster with us. And at any stage, if you need assistance, our support is just an email away.