Changelog

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.
  
• Integrated Accounts Page: Show active subscriptions and payments right within your app. Also link to the Freemius Customer Portal for advanced account management.
  

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

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.

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

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.

This week we are rolling out several polishing improvements to our email system. These changes affect most of the emails sent by our system and include a number of small fixes.

The most notable update is the improved layout and overall visual consistency.

In addition, we have fixed a few UI glitches that appeared in certain dark mode email clients.

Overall, our emails are now more compliant and better optimized for compatibility across a wide range of email clients.

We have introduced a new API endpoint to help makers easily and securely download invoices for users. The new endpoint is:

/products/{product_id}/users/{user_id}/payments/{payment_id}/invoice.pdf

Detailed documentation can be found here.

This is especially useful if you’re implementing the Customer Portal inside your application (for example using the JS SDK). The endpoint validates that the payment belongs to the specified user before delivering the invoice, adding an extra layer of safety in user-facing integrations. For these use cases, we recommend using this new endpoint over the more direct one.

In last week we released an update following a compliance requirement from the wp.org plugin review team. The SDK integration snippet generated by the Developer Dashboard will now always have the is_org_compliant flag present (even though implicitly it has a true value).

This week we are releasing another update where our deployment mechanism will inspect the codebase itself and automatically add the flag if it is missing. This change ensures existing products remain compliant, even if the integration snippet was not manually updated.

As a follow-up to the recently released email customization feature, this week we are deploying the following enhancements:

1. The email section no longer requires a title to be present, giving you more flexibility when adding concise instructions or contextual notes.
2. The custom section now appears earlier in the email, with a UI that feels more naturally integrated into the overall email layout.

You can head to Emails → Customization to start customizing it right away.

We have also further enhanced the UI/UX of the Developer Dashboard around this feature:

1. The preview UI is now snappier and more compact.
2. A separate Styling tab has been introduced for email branding customization, reducing clutter under the single Customization tab.