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.
At Freemius, we care deeply about optimizing Checkout conversions. Whether it’s the billing form, upsells, or the cart, every part of our Checkout experience is built with conversion in mind. This week, we’re rolling out another small but impactful optimization.
The card brand icons shown during Checkout are now localized based on the selected billing country. For example, buyers in the Netherlands will only see VISA, Mastercard, and AMEX — while less relevant options like JCB or Discover are hidden. This change reduces visual clutter and helps buyers quickly recognize and select their preferred payment method.
This week, we are rolling out the final batch of our API endpoints that were pending documentation. You can access them directly from our API documentation website. This batch primarily focuses on Reviews and Licensing, making app integration significantly easier.
With this, we’re wrapping up our commitment to fully documenting the entire API using the OpenAPI specification. Going forward, any new endpoints or changes will be documented on an ad-hoc basis as part of our regular changelog updates.
We’re excited to announce that the Freemius Checkout is now fully compliant with the EU Accessibility Act, which comes into enforcement on June 28th. This means that by using Freemius Checkout, your website remains compliant with EU law.
But we didn’t stop at just the legal requirements. We’ve gone a few steps further by also implementing recommended accessibility best practices, making sure our Checkout delivers an inclusive and user-friendly experience for everyone.
Here are some of the key improvements we’ve made:
Better Contrast Ratio & Focus States
We updated color schemes and font sizes to ensure compliance with WCAG 2.2 Level AA.
Additionally, all interactive elements like buttons and links now have clear focus states, supporting both keyboard and assistive tech navigation.
Best Possible Keyboard Navigation
We audited and improved keyboard navigation across the entire Checkout experience. There are no keyboard focus traps, and every component is now fully navigable using the keyboard, with relevant focus states clearly visible at all times.
Proper ARIA Live Regions
Freemius Checkout is dynamic. Price calculations and form updates happen in real-time.
We’ve added ARIA live regions to ensure screen readers can detect and announce content changes appropriately.
All form validation errors are now descriptive, with appropriate ARIA roles applied.
Accessible Form Components
We’ve audited all form elements, both native and custom, to ensure:
Our JavaScript SDK has also received accessibility enhancements:
The close (×) button is now always visible, not just on hover
The modal overlay and iFrame includes appropriate `role` and `title` attributes
The active element is now focused back when the modal closes
If you are using the hosted version of the SDK (https://checkout.freemius.com/js/v1/) then no action is necessary from your side. If you’re using the npm package, then we urge that you update as soon as possible.
With these improvements wrapped up for the Checkout, our next focus is the Customer Portal.
Stay tuned for further updates and if you notice any accessibility issues or have suggestions, reach out to our support team. We’d love to hear from you!
This sleek new look isn’t just a facelift, it signals to your buyers that they’re dealing with a modern, reliable, and forward-thinking platform.
Addition of Masked License Key & ID
If you take a closer look, you’ll notice the invoice now includes a masked license key and the ID. This helps buyers quickly identify the purchase they’re looking for. It also improves support workflows — when buyers share invoices with you, you can easily cross-reference them with license keys in the Developer Dashboard.
Stay tuned as we continue rolling out more rebranded components across the platform.
Under Plans → Code/Link, we’ve added direct links to our documentation. This should help new makers better understand how to implement the overlay code and no-code links of our Checkout.
We also fixed a UI issue with popovers, where multiple popovers could stay open at the same time. This has now been resolved.
As part of our ongoing rebranding project—where we’re modernizing every aspect of our platform and product—we’re excited to announce the next phase: emails.
We’ve redesigned our email templates and have begun rolling them out gradually. Starting today, you’ll see the new modern look for several purchase-related emails.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out more transactional emails, including those sent to your customers and users.
These changes are non-breaking. Any existing customizations will remain intact. For customer and user emails, you’ll need to opt in to the new system. Stay tuned—more details coming soon.
A while ago, we announced a new feature for the Checkout allowing you to set a redirection URL after a successful purchase. Initially, this was limited only to SaaS products.
However, based on feedback from our makers community, we’re now unlocking this feature for all product types supported by Freemius.
A post-checkout thank you or “purchase completed” page can be useful in many scenarios, especially when the Hosted Checkout link is shared via email, social media, or other marketing channels.
To get started, head over to the Plans → Customization section and enable the Checkout Success Redirection switch. More details are available in our documentation.
Additional Improvements
The redirection URL now includes amount, tax, and currency as query parameters.
To improve clarity the action query parameter has been extended to include:
payment_method_update – When the buyer has just updated the payment method without changing any plans or pricing.
license_update – When the buyer has updated the plan or pricing of the license.
Fixed an edge case where redirection data wasn’t properly populated for iDEAL checkout flows.
The links now use time-limited authorized tokens instead of license keys, improving both security and alignment with best practices.
We also removed the currency parameter from the payload documentation. This was mistakenly included earlier — Freemius does not support changing currency through the license renewal or upgrade flow.
Upgrade links provide a great UX for your buyers to manage their subscriptions. You can find the detailed documentation here.
Bug Fix for Deployment Update API Endpoint
We noticed an issue in the deployment update API endpoint where the limit value was incorrectly accepting negative integers and converting them to 0.
The limit value is used for staged rollouts — a great way to gradually release deployments, helping to catch bugs earlier within a tighter feedback loop. However, due to this bug, an incorrect value would essentially disable staged rollout altogether.
This bug has now been fixed. Additionally, we’ve updated the UI to prevent negative values from being submitted.
When this feature is enabled, our Checkout shows an error message if an already subscribed user attempts to subscribe again.
With this release, we’ve enhanced the UI by automatically including a link that directs users to upgrade their subscription. The link leads to the Freemius-managed Customer Portal, offering an out-of-the-box experience for your buyers to manage their purchases and licenses.
Historically, Freemius allowed adding Skype as one of the support channels configured for a plan. This information would appear in various places such as post-purchase emails, helping your buyers easily reach out for support.
With Skype being gradually phased out, we have now removed the functionality and the associated UI from our system. For those who had Skype set up as a support option, it has been automatically removed and will no longer appear in any relevant areas of the platform.
As Freemius now issues Reverse Invoices and includes them in Payout emails, we identified an authentication issue with the tokenized invoice links. The issue occurred when accessing the invoice link while being logged into the Developer Dashboard with a different account. This particularly impacted makers who shared the invoice URLs with team members holding accountant-level access.
Previously, we recommended using an incognito window to work around the issue, but we understand this was far from ideal.
With today’s deployment, this problem has been resolved. The tokenized secure download links for invoices will now work seamlessly, regardless of the account you’re logged into.
We discovered an edge case bug where, in some rare scenarios, our payment method update process would display an incorrect error message. Although the payment method was updated successfully, the UI mistakenly indicated a failure—causing unnecessary confusion for buyers.
The root cause of the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed.
All our endpoints are now properly documented to help SaaS makers quickly find what they need to build the custom integrations they envision.
Additionally, we’ve added detailed documentation on Deployments — perfect for WordPress makers looking to tap into the full power of the Freemius API for advanced automation.
Our API is fully documented using the OpenAPI v3 specification, so you can easily download the raw schema and use it with your preferred tools — whether it’s to generate client libraries, test requests, or integrate with Postman or Swagger UI.
This week we’re rolling out several SaaS-friendly improvements to our Checkout.
Smarter Discount Calculation
Previously, our discount calculation was limited to 2 or 3 decimal places — sufficient for the WordPress ecosystem but limiting for SaaS products where pricing often involves high precision (e.g., bulk credit purchases where each unit costs less than 0.0001).
Our Checkout is now smart enough to detect such cases and display the correct level of precision. Additionally, large numbers in the license unit section are now formatted for better readability.
Improved Line Item to Show Renewal Price
Based on feedback from our maker community, we’ve added more clarity to the renewal pricing. Specifically, when there’s a discount involved (e.g., annual or volume-based discounts), the Checkout will now display a “Renews” line item just after “Today’s total”.
You can also force this line item to always appear — even when there’s no discount — by enabling the always_show_renewals_amountconfiguration.
Responsiveness Improvements in Hosted Checkout
We’ve made layout improvements to enhance the responsiveness of the Hosted Checkout.
The Checkout now adjusts more gracefully to both vertical and horizontal screen sizes, offering a smoother and more optimized buying experience across devices.
Freemius offers a fully managed deployment solution for various WordPress products — including Plugins, Themes, Templates, Widgets, and more. Among the many features, we take care of Free and Premium version generation, license activation, and pushing updates to your buyers’ sites.
We realized that many of these features weren’t well surfaced in the deployment page UI. So, we’ve rolled out an update to better expose the most commonly used features, such as:
Deployment Automation – With our community-powered GitHub Action and other libraries.
Paid and Free Version Generation – Clearer information on how these versions are generated.
Composer Integration – Guidance on leveraging Freemius’ built-in Composer support.
We’ve also updated our documentation to reflect these enhancements. In addition, we’ve opened up the relevant API endpoints to work with your product’s Bearer Token — allowing you to create new versions directly from your CI/CD pipeline.
We hope these updates help you streamline and automate your version deployments more effectively.
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