Changelog

Welcome to the changelog section of Freemius, here you'll find our weekly technical update notes. You can subscribe to all posts via Newsletter or follow us on Twitter to stay updated.

New Custom Download Links for Apps

This week we are releasing a new feature aimed at App makers. When selling apps, makers often want to provide access to the application immediately after purchase. To make this easier, Freemius now allows you to configure multiple download URLs for your application.

Simply go to the Settings page of your app and you will see a new tab, Download Links. From there, you can add as many links as you want by providing a label and the URL.

Configure download links

Once configured, the download links will automatically show up in various transactional emails:

Download Link in emails

They will also appear in the Downloads section of the Customer Portal.

Download link in Customer Portal

More information can be found in our documentation. If you have any feedback about the feature, please let us know.

Better Product Settings UX, Transfer Flow Updates, and SaaS Refund Improvements

This week we’re rolling out various improvements and bug fixes to our Developer Dashboard. Many of these updates come directly from maker feedback, while others are aimed at improving the overall UX.

Improved Product Transfer Form

Freemius allows you to easily transfer your product to a new owner. This is especially useful when acquiring or selling a business.

Product transfer dialog

We noticed some inconsistencies in the transfer dialog UI, especially around transferring a product to the new owner’s store. To make the flow easier to understand, we have revised the UI copy.

Improved Product Settings Page UX

The product settings page intentionally does not auto-update when configurations are changed. Since some changes can have important side effects, we require makers to click the Update button for the changes to take effect. However, because the button was placed below a long form, it was easy to miss and often caused confusion.

Product settings page improvement

To improve this:

  1. The Update button will now stay stuck to the bottom whenever there are unsaved changes in the settings.
  2. If you try to navigate away from the page with unsaved changes, we will show a confirmation message.

In addition, we noticed that the Delete button was placed next to the Update button.

Danger zone - delete product

To make the action completely separate, we have moved the Delete button to a separate section and added a disclaimer for this destructive action.

Improved Refund Dialog for SaaS

Freemius allows you to easily process refunds. The refund form is also quite powerful, letting you choose what to do with the associated subscription and license.

However, we noticed that showing options related to WordPress licenses in the SaaS context could be confusing. In WordPress, our SDK treats license flags such as expiration and is_cancelled differently depending on how plans are configured. This gives makers flexibility to block updates while keeping paid access, or revoke paid access altogether. SaaS products, on the other hand, do not have the same behavior or configuration model.

SaaS payment refund form

To make the refund flow clearer, we now show only two license-related options in the SaaS refund dialog: whether to keep the paid benefit or revoke it. We hope this makes the system simpler and more intuitive for our SaaS makers.

Other Enhancements

  • The registration form has been updated to use the same questionnaire as our new product registration form.
  • Fixed a UI glitch where the expiration date of a lifetime license was shown incorrectly.

Freemius Checkout Now Fully Supports Hrvatski

Last week we released beta support for the Hrvatski language in Croatia. This week, with help from our maker community, we are glad to release it out of beta.

Checkout Now Fully Supports Hrvatski

This means you can now simply use the auto value for the language parameter, and buyers coming from Croatia will see the Checkout in their language.

If you would like us to translate our Checkout into your own language, please feel free to get in touch with our support team and we can work it out.

Emailing System Improvements: Trial Started Email Customization and More

This week we’re rolling out various improvements and fixes to our emailing system.

Customize Trial Started Email

Following up on our last deployment, where we enabled makers to customize emails, we have added a new email to the customization list: the “Trial Started” email.

Trial email customization

We understand that the trial email plays an equally crucial role as the new subscription or purchase email, since many Apps & SaaS products use trials to onboard customers. With this rollout, our emailing system becomes more customizable to better support your software business needs. Please reach out to us if you have additional requirements.

Other Fixes

  • The tone customization setting was not respected for a few emails. This has now been fixed.
  • We also fixed an issue with markdown processing in some emails.
  • We fixed the retrieval of the last 30 days of email logs from SendGrid, which in some cases—especially for products without proper DKIM configuration—was not working correctly.

Customer Portal Now Supports App Activations Management

This week we are rolling out a significant upgrade to our Customer Portal, aimed specifically at App makers. Our system already allows you to handle license key activations using the Freemius API. Once a license is activated, an “Install” entity is created on our end.

However, until now, buyers did not have a simple or proper way to view and manage those activations from the Freemius Customer Portal. To deactivate a license, they had to rely on the app itself or contact the maker, which did not provide the best experience.

Starting today, we are introducing a new Activations page in the Customer Portal. From here, your buyers can see the devices or instances where the license has been activated.

Activation page Customer Portal

Clicking an item will also show the corresponding plan and provide an easy option to upgrade or downgrade.

Activation details Customer Portal

In addition, buyers can now deactivate a license directly from a device by clicking the deactivate button. A confirmation step is shown before the license is actually deactivated.

Deactivate License from the Activations page

Other Improvements

In addition, we have also refined other sections like Websites and Downloads to make them more suitable for all kinds of products. For example:

  1. The Websites and Downloads pages will no longer show App or SaaS products, and they will be completely hidden if no WordPress or template products exist in your store.
  2. Similarly, we no longer show the Licenses page if the store contains only SaaS products, since these do not expose the license key.

Please stay tuned as we continue rolling out more features for App makers. Coming up next is support for configurable download links.

Freemius Checkout Updates: License-Based Billing Defaults and Croatian Language Support

This week we rolled out the following updates for the Freemius Checkout.

Billing Cycle Now Defaults to the License

We found that our Checkout defaulted to the annual billing cycle in the context of a license update. This could create confusion for buyers, especially when renewing their license from the Customer Portal or upgrading to a different plan. To make the experience more consistent, Checkout will now respect the billing cycle of the license by default.

Checkout License Update

You can still generate custom upgrade links with a different billing cycle, for example to promote an upgrade from monthly to annual, and that behavior remains unchanged.

New Hrvatski Language Support for Croatia

We have released beta language support for Hrvatski. To use it right away, simply pass language: 'hr' while configuring the language of the Checkout.

Croatian language support for Freemius Checkout

Our Checkout already supports the EUR currency, and with this release we hope to make the buying experience feel more native for buyers in Croatia. The translation is currently in beta as we gather feedback from makers. Once it is out of beta, it will be selected automatically when the Checkout is loaded with language: 'auto'.

Clearer ZIP Deployment Errors and Better Self-Help Guidance

We noticed that some makers were running into deployment issues because of how their ZIP files were created. While our system was able to detect these issues, the UI did not clearly communicate what went wrong or how to fix it. To make troubleshooting easier and provide better self-help guidance, we revamped the UI.

Deployment error UI

Known issues are now identified more clearly, and each one links to the relevant documentation for additional context. We also updated our documentation with OS-specific guides for creating ZIP files, along with additional troubleshooting resources.

Better Metrics, Navigation, and Cleanup in Developer Dashboard

This week we’re rolling out various quality of life improvements to the Developer Dashboard.

Corrected Metric Badge Indicators

We identified an issue where some metric badges on the Analytics Dashboard page (for WordPress products) were showing incorrect comparisons. For example, a decrease in trial cancellation count was still marked in red with a downward arrow, indicating a negative change, whereas it is conceptually positive. This has now been corrected across relevant metrics.

Metric comparison badge update

Shareable Links for Plans Tabs

All individual tabs in the Plans page now have unique URLs. This makes it easier to share direct links within teams and allows our support team to point to specific settings when needed.

Plans page tab has links

Improved App & SaaS Context by Removing “Sites” References

We identified some references to “Sites” that are not relevant for App & SaaS products. These have now been removed (especially inside individual user information and also from tables like Events, as well as Subscriptions), making the experience more consistent across product types.

Removed irrelevant Site and Localhost info from user page for App & SaaS

Other Fixes

  • The sidebar and detail panels of the Licenses and Subscriptions pages had some minor UI glitches. These have now been fixed.
  • We noticed a regression where the “Join Freemius Slack” item in the Setup Checklist could not be marked as completed. This has been fixed.

Customer Portal UX Improvements

This week we are releasing additional fixes and enhancements to the Customer Portal. These changes are aimed at providing a better experience for your customers.

Better Site and Subscription Details

We cleaned up the sidebar that displays site, subscription, or license details.

Site details in Customer Portal

Depending on the context, the most relevant information is now displayed first. Additional information and configuration options, such as “License security“, are now placed inside an expandable section. To make the experience smoother, the UI will also remember whether a user has expanded any of these sections.

Better FAQs

FAQs are now displayed based on the relevant products available in the store.

Customer Portal FAQs

For example, if the user hasn’t purchased any WordPress products, or if your store doesn’t sell any, the “Installation” (or website-related) FAQs will no longer be shown. Similar improvements have also been applied to the Support Contact Form.

Store Settings Page Now Organized with Tabs

This week we are rolling out a useful update to the Store Settings page in the Freemius Developer Dashboard. Previously, all store configurations were displayed on a single page, which made it difficult to quickly find the relevant settings. Many makers also shared similar feedback with us.

To improve the UX, we are now grouping related settings into separate tabs.

Store page in the Developer Dashboard

For example, the basic configuration is now grouped under the “Information” tab. If you’re looking to embed the Customer Portal, you can now find it under the “Customer Portal” tab.

Customer Portal config under stores

Additionally, we have fixed a few minor UI glitches across the Developer Dashboard. We hope this change makes it easier for you to navigate and manage your store settings.

Norway Tax Refund Issue in Developer Dashboard Fixed

Freemius supports tax refunds against a valid tax ID. For example, if a customer forgot to enter their VAT number during checkout, you can issue the refund from the Developer Dashboard. The associated subscription will then be updated and the tax amount will be exempted using the reverse charge mechanism.

Norway tax refund

We identified an issue in the Developer Dashboard where the tax refund option for Norway was not working properly. This has now been fixed.

Email Footer Layout Fix and Dark Mode Improvements

We identified a regression in last week’s email style update where the footer was mistakenly pushed inside the main email content area. This unintentionally made the “Sent by Freemius” line more prominent. When sending emails to customers on your behalf, our goal is to give better visibility to your product.

Email footer

With that in mind, we have deployed a fix as shown in the screenshot above. We also ensured the footer renders nicely in dark mode for email clients like Gmail.

End-to-End Lovable Integration Guide for Freemius Checkout & Monetization

With the evolution of AI, our software industry has taken a huge leap. Language and technical complexity are no longer barriers to creating software. Anyone with a product idea can now build applications and SaaS products with platforms like Lovable, Bolt, etc.

Once such software is created, there’s often value in sharing it with others—and eventually monetizing it. At Freemius, we understand this can be challenging for non-technical makers.

With that in mind, and to make it super easy for everyone to integrate Freemius Checkout and monetization, we’ve released a guide for a full end-to-end integration of Freemius with Lovable.

Lovable Integration Guide with Freemius

It all happens with a single prompt:

Implement the Freemius integration based on the knowledgebase content.

The outcome is as impressive as this:

  • Integrated Pricing Page and Checkout: Your users will see the pricing you’ve configured in Freemius and will be able to purchase your product through the Freemius Checkout.
  • Gated Premium Features: Easily gate premium features behind a paywall, and only allow access to users who have purchased your product.
    Paywall UI in Lovable App
  • Integrated Accounts Page: Show active subscriptions and payments right within your app. Also link to the Freemius Customer Portal for advanced account management.
    Accounts Page

Head over to our docs to get started with the integration.

Volume Discount Now Visible in Reverse Invoice and Payout Emails

Freemius supports growth pricing or high-volume rates where the more you earn, the more you save. When your monthly gross sales exceed $50,000, the revenue share drops progressively, going as low as 0.5%. You can read more about it in our docs here.

This discount is applied automatically during the monthly payout. With today’s deployment, we are introducing a clearer UI in both the reverse invoice and the payout email so you can easily see the exact volume discount applied to your earnings.

Reverse Invoice

As you can see, the reverse invoice will now prominently display the volume discount applied for the payout.

Payout email showing volume discount

Similarly, your payout emails will also show the volume discount you received for the month, making it easier to reconcile your earnings at a glance.

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