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.
We recently introduced the Reverse Invoice feature, where Freemius generates the payout invoice on your behalf.
We identified a minor bug where, in some cases, the business name on the invoice wasn’t pulled from your bank wire configuration. This issue has now been fixed.
In line with our recent rebranding efforts, we’ve renamed the User Dashboard to Customer Portal.
The Customer Portal is a hosted solution from Freemius where your buyers (Customers) can log in to manage their subscriptions, access payment history, upgrade plans, retrieve license keys, download products, and more.
It’s completely free and can even be embedded on your website with SSO.
This rebranding is just the first step—more updates are on the way. For now, we’ve updated the logo and refreshed a few outdated phrases. Stay tuned for more exciting changes coming soon!
Freemius allows you to set up special coupons to boost your sales and marketing efforts. Simply head over to Coupons → Special Coupons in the Developer Dashboard to get started.
We recently discovered a UI bug where clicking the Remove button to reset a special coupon would break the interface, requiring a page reload to recover. This issue has now been fixed.
This week, we’re rolling out some minor UI/UX improvements to our Checkout.
By default, our Checkout shows the license selector UI so that your buyers can easily choose the license/quota they want.
Previously, this UI would appear even when there was only one license quota available for the plan. While this made sense for WordPress products, it’s unnecessary for SaaS and Apps.
Starting today, the license selector UI will only be shown if your plan has more than one license quota available.
Note: You can still use the hide_licenses option to hide the selector for other product types or even when your plan has multiple license options.
Since the release of our new Checkout JS SDK, we’ve supported custom spinners that appear while the Checkout loads.
However, we realized that the default spinner hadn’t been rebranded. That’s now fixed. Starting this week, once a buyer clicks the buy button on your website/app, the updated spinner shown above will appear.
We recently discovered that the license key was unintentionally omitted from all license-related webhook events. This issue has now been resolved. Webhook listeners will now receive the full license object, which includes the secret_key property — representing the license key.
We’ve rolled out a new API endpoint that allows you to automatically generate Freemius Checkout links for upgrading a license.
While our Customer Portal already handles license upgrades internally, this endpoint is especially useful for SaaS makers who want to implement their own billing experience.
You can read more about the endpoint in our documentation. In a nutshell, from your product’s scope, make a request like:
POST /v1/products/{product_id}/licenses/{license_id}/checkout/link.json HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Bearer 123
Host: api.freemius.com
Content-Length: 127
{
"plan_id": "planID",
"billing_cycle": "annual",
"quota": 1,
"currency": "usd"
}
The response will include:
url – The URL of the Hosted Checkoutsettings – Configuration parameters you can pass directly to the Checkout JS SDKexpires – The datetime when the URL will expireWe hope this new endpoint, along with Checkout Redirection and Webhooks, helps streamline your SaaS integration. As we continue improving the SaaS developer experience, please reach out via support with any questions or feature suggestions.
We released a new feature this week for our Hosted Checkout — you can now configure it to redirect to a specific page after a successful purchase. The redirected page will automatically receive purchase-related data.
This is especially helpful for SaaS makers who want to use Hosted Checkout directly within their software, email marketing, social platforms, etc.
Here’s how it works:
Currently, this feature is available for SaaS-type products only. To enable it, go to Plans → Customization and toggle the switch to get started. To learn more about how to use this feature and verify the purchase data please read our documentation.
If you are not using Freemius for SaaS, but using for other products like WordPress plugins/themes or Apps, and if you have a valid use-case of this feature, please let us know through support and we might consider enabling this for other product types too.
At Freemius, we’re committed to simplifying all aspects of your compliance work. In that spirit, we’re excited to introduce a new feature: we now generate Reverse Invoices on your behalf for your payouts.
Getting paid through Freemius is easy — whether it’s via PayPal, wire transfer, or Payoneer. On the Earnings page, you can view your monthly payout amounts.
Now, on the same Earnings page, you’ll find the option to download a Reverse Invoice for each payout.
These invoices are issued to Freemius on your behalf. To generate them, you’ll need to ensure your billing information is properly set. If you haven’t done that yet, now is the perfect time.
We hope this addition helps streamline your accounting process. Soon, these invoices will also be included in payout emails.
This feature is currently in beta — if you spot any bugs or have suggestions, feel free to reach out to us through support.
In the SaaS world, it’s common (and often expected) for a user to have only one active subscription at a time. However, accidental duplicate subscriptions can lead to unnecessary support tickets, billing disputes, and frustrated users — all of which take time away from growing your product.
To help prevent these headaches, we’ve introduced a new feature that lets you restrict users to a single active subscription. While you could implement this logic yourself, we believe great developer experience (DX) means providing tools that reliably handle these common edge cases for you.
To enforce this simply head to your product’s Settings page and enable the Restrict Single Subscription Per User toggle.
Since this is a common practice among SaaS products, this setting is now enabled by default for all newly created SaaS products. If you created your SaaS product before this update, the feature will be disabled by default, but you can enable it anytime from the settings page.
Once enabled, our checkout will automatically block users from purchasing multiple subscriptions and display an error message like the one below:
If you’d like to customize the error message, just reach out to us via support and we’ll help you set it up.
And of course, if you prefer to allow multiple subscriptions per user, you can disable this feature at any time.
At Freemius, we’re always working to reduce friction for makers, so you can focus on building, not battling support issues. If you’d like to suggest more features, please feel free to get in touch with us through support or use our feature board.
We identified a UI bug where the Delete button was missing from the “Installed” products section of a website page in the Customer Portal.
This UI allows buyers/users to delete the installation data of a Freemius product from a website — particularly useful when a product was removed ad-hoc, without going through the proper uninstallation process.
This bug has now been fixed, and the Delete button will appear and work as expected.
Last week, we noticed intermittent downtime across our Developer Dashboard and some API servers. Upon investigation, we found that this was caused by unexpectedly high traffic volumes and overall network growth.
To resolve this, we identified bottlenecks in our infrastructure and deployed several improvements and fixes. These changes not only resolved the downtime but also enhanced overall performance. For example:
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Fortunately, no critical systems were affected. As a precaution, we have also invested in additional monitoring systems to help us detect and address such bottlenecks more efficiently in the future.
Freemius supports securing your account with two-factor authentication. We recently discovered that the 2FA input was not accepting pasted codes from Samsung Keyboard’s clipboard bubble.
This issue has now been fixed, enabling smoother 2FA code pasting from the keyboard toolbar.
We have deployed two minor UI improvements to our Checkout this week.
As a regression to our newly introduced UX improvements for the VAT Number UI, we noticed there was extra left-over padding on the zip/postal code input. This has now been fixed.
We noticed that we’ve been incorrectly showing the money-back guarantee UI when the Checkout is opened in the context of a Free plan. The same has now been fixed.
This week, we’re rolling out several UI/UX improvements to the Developer Dashboard.
We’ve reorganized the columns in the Payments and Subscription tables to prioritize the most important data at the beginning. Additionally, we’ve refined some wording to enhance clarity.
We observed that the offline UI was sometimes too quick to detect network issues. We’ve identified these cases and deployed a fix to improve its accuracy.
Freemius allows both you, as a maker, and your buyers to cancel subscriptions at any time. We recently identified a regression where cancellations made very close to the renewal date were sometimes failing. This issue has now been fixed.