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 noticed that our system was rejecting any Stripe usernames containing the : character. In this iteration, we have fixed this issue.
You can add a Skype username under the Developer Dashboard’s Support section of a plan.
Freemius has powerful marketing automation with Ratings & Reviews. Apart from getting reviews, you can also use the Developer Dashboard to generate and share card-like images.
We noticed an issue where the review title could sometimes get misaligned. We have pushed a fix for the same.
Now the images generated look properly aligned.
Not long ago, we introduced two-factor authentication to tighten the security of the Developer Dashboard. The 2FA UI shows a QR code for scanning from your favorite authenticator app.
Following requests from our partners, we’ve added an enhancement so you can copy the code directly and put it in your authenticator app, without scanning the QR code. This is handy when the authenticator is on the same device from where the Developer Dashboard is opened.
Our Version Deployment feature is a powerful tool for developers. Recently, it came to our attention that the readme.txt processor was unintentionally adding extra line spaces while stripping codes in between [//]: # fs_{free|premium}_only_{begin|end} tags.
We’ve fixed the issue and added improvements to handle both block and inline tags. As seen above, texts are properly stripped off and consistently maintain the space and new lines.
While refunding a payment, we’ve always had the option to cancel the associated subscription. But it was not selected by default.
Following feedback from our partners, we are now auto-selecting the checkbox while issuing a refund. You can of course still uncheck the box to keep the subscription going.
To further emphasize the action that will cancel the subscription, the button now says “Yes – Refund & Cancel” when the checkbox is selected.
We’ve added tons of shiny new updates to the Freemius analytics. Starting today, you’ll see a new “Average Order Value” chart on the Sales Analytics page. We’ve also improved the categories of the “Total Installations” chart.
Average Order Value (AOV) is the average revenue per order, including subscription renewals, lifetime purchases, and paid trials. On the Sales Analytics page, a new card displays the AOV since you first published your product with Freemius.
Further down the page and under the Revenue section, a chart showing AOV changes for a selected period is displayed.
We’ve added a new category called “Uninstalled Installs” to make the Total Installations chart more useful. This new category displays the number of installs explicitly uninstalled or removed.
This was a feature request from our partners.
From now on, when you select a currency for a product or a store, the selection will persist in your browser.
The first legend of the Net Payments & Transactions chart used to be labeled as “New Subscriptions”. This created some confusion as the metric was showing the first payment of a subscription. If you’re offering a paid trial, the first payment of a subscription can come weeks later.
To clear up the confusion, we’ve renamed the legend to Subscription 1st Payments. Thanks to our partners for reporting this!
We’ve released several updates to our Checkout application:
We noticed some valid VAT IDs were being blocked by the Checkout app.
We fixed this by rolling out a more robust VAT ID validation system for the front-end app.
Certain strings — especially those coming up as exceptions (for example, “Invalid coupon code”) — were not getting translated.
We’ve introduced fixes for them. You can also use the Freemius Checkout Buy Button API to load the Checkout in one of the supported languages.
We’ve improved the “fuzzy” logic of the Country Selector UI search feature. The search is now more natural and accurate.
We are super happy to announce the immediate availability of a geolocation-based payments distribution chart. This chart shows the total distribution of payments by geolocation or country.
The chart helps determine the country of your major target audience.
The chart also shows the gross volume of payments that occurred per day distributed over countries by default. It can also show the payment count (instead of gross).
You can also customize the chart to show the total gross volume of payments that occurred from the beginning to the selected day, plotted over a stacked area chart or a simple area chart, along with a tabular view to see the total volume of payment gross and payment count until the end date.
Following the development of the Geo Payments chart, we piggybacked the features to the existing charts in the Audience Analytics page.
As you can see, the charts can now be plotted as ‘Area’ or ‘Diff’, along with the already existing ‘Stacked Area’ visualization.
We’ve improved the data export-related permissions in the Developer Dashboard. Only a Product Owner or an Admin can export data from the ‘Users’ page.
The rest of the roles can either have view-only permissions (for example Developer or Support) or be completely blocked from viewing Users (for example Accountant).
The ‘Download’ button will now be hidden for roles with view-only permission. The API will also block a request to the .csv endpoint.
We noticed that our checkout’s footer was being cut off on some mobile devices.
In this iteration, we fixed this regression. Additionally, we also improved the native scrolling experience on mobile browsers. The mobile menu bar will now automatically be hidden when scrolling down, giving more real estate to the Checkout app.
We’d been using the term “Annually” in the billing cycle UI for a long time. While this was not technically incorrect, the term ‘Annual’ fits better (kudos to our Support Lead, Leo, and Digital Copywriter, Robert).
In this update, we changed the term.
We’ve added a small enhancement to include the customer’s ‘Store Profile’ link in the transactional emails we send to developers.
This helps developers quickly view the customer’s profile in the context of the product’s store. Transactional emails are sent for new purchases, renewals, etc.
We’ve pushed a few more improvements to make our system more SaaS-friendly.
In the context of SaaS, ‘Lifetime’ often doesn’t make a lot of sense.
To improve the checkout experience, we’ve changed the title to ‘One Time’ instead.
We noticed a small edge-case regression where the checkout line item and subtotal were not matching in cases of SaaS products. We’ve pushed a fix.
Today, we’re rolling out the new Checkout for everyone.
The new style will show up regardless of whether you have a custom CSS setting for the legacy checkout or not.
If you want to customize the new Checkout with CSS, please see our official guide here.
Make sure to save the URL in the ‘Custom Checkout CSS file’ under the Developer Dashboard and not the one marked as (Legacy).
If for some reason you’d still like to use the legacy Checkout, we are offering it for a limited time. You must pass the checkout_style: 'legacy' in the JS snippet configuration.
const handler = FS.Checkout.configure({
plugin_id: '9987',
plan_id: '16744',
public_key: 'pk_f6ac0907ee421b1db0c94833cf26b',
image: 'https://your-plugin-site.com/logo-100x100.png'
});
$('#purchase').on('click', function (e) {
handler.open({
// Force load the legacy checkout
checkout_style: 'legacy',
name : 'My Awesome SaaS',
// ...
});
e.preventDefault();
});
We urge you to stop using the legacy Checkout and migrate to the new one as soon as possible.
In a bid to make our system more friendly to SaaS businesses, we’ve implemented the following improvements to our Checkout.
Following up on a request from our makers, we’ve introduced month as a license unit label (for example 5 Months API access).
Notably, we’ve also removed the word License from the dropdown as it makes little to no sense for SaaS checkouts. You’ll also notice that the input field asking for an existing license key to ‘upgrade’ the license is also hidden for SaaS.
If you’d like to customize the license unit of your SaaS, please get in touch with us.
Because SaaS requires different post-purchase instructions, we’ve added the capability in our system to modify the message shown after making a payment.
This feature is still in beta. If you’d like to change your post-purchase message, please get in touch with us.
We’ve stopped adding the word Lifetime before the plan name in the ‘Item Description’ for SaaS products and lifetime billing cycles. Usually, one-time payments for a SaaS business means purchasing a specific amount of resources. Therefore, the word Lifetime could be confusing.
We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new metric in your Developer Dashboard.
Previously, we relied on the ‘Activations’ and ‘Deactivations’ events to determine or project the number of active installations or sites a plugin might have. We realized this metric was error-prone because of how the SDK can be used.
We’ve introduced a much better metric to more accurately determine total Active and Abandoned Installs.
The same metric is now used to accurately determine the ‘Opted In Active Installs’ and ‘All-time Installs’ in the lifetime data section.