Changelog

Following the trend of #buildinpublic, we’ve created a cool feature for you in the Developer Dashboard. You can now share any chart that you see in the Developer Dashboard.

Sharing Features

• You can switch between different background gradients and colors.
• You can choose to hide numbers from the chart.
• You can toggle between light and dark themes for the chart, regardless of the theme of the Developer Dashboard.

Here’s a sample:

We hope you will enjoy this feature. Please let us know your feedback.

Following our last major release of checkout tax and billing improvements, we’ve gathered feedback and pushed a UX improvement.

We’ve shown a “disclaimer” below the billing country regarding the applicable tax. However, in the case of VAT, the tax amount is exempted by law when entering your business VAT ID. The disclaimer becomes confusing since it still says “xx% VAT applied…”.

As an improvement, we won’t show the disclaimer when a valid VAT ID is entered in the checkout form.

In this deployment, we’ve improved how we handle tax and billing information in our Checkout application. Up until now, one had to click on a different part of the UI to change the taxing country.

We realized this could create confusion among the buyers who have updated their billing information in the Credit Card or PayPal section. To simplify the UI/UX, we’ve removed the dedicated UI. Now the taxation will simply correspond to the selected billing country of the buyer.

Backend Fixes

• We found an edge-case scenario where a product’s payment could not be refunded. We have found the issue and have pushed a fix.
• We noticed a regression in our last major update on the analytics system. The MRR and Active Subscription metrics were incorrect, including sandbox subscriptions. We have pushed a fix for this.
• We noticed and fixed a small typo on the EULA page of Freemius products.

Developer Dashboard Enhancements

Coupons Settings UI Enhancement

We have deployed a bunch of enhancements to the coupon settings UI.

1. The coupon code will now always be visible inside the sticky header.
2. The Is Active toggle is also now a part of the sticky header, located beside the close button.
3. We have also fixed some layout issues along the way.

PayPal account types

We have renamed the PayPal account types in the “Payouts” section of the profile page to better reflect their meaning.

You will now get a clear indication to understand what the different types of accounts mean.

Marketing Opt-In UI in the checkout

We noticed in some cases the marketing UI was defaulting to “No” instead of asking the user about their choice.

We fixed this regression. Now the UI will be in an indeterminate state, making the customer choose their preference.

Fixing user.created event

We noticed in some edge cases the event was not fired. We figured out the root cause and have pushed a fix.

Regression in subscription cancellation email

We noticed some regression in the modification we made in the subscription cancellation email to have its replyTo set to the user instead of Freemius. We have reverted the change for the time being. We will investigate the issue and fix it in the near future.

Fixing User Notes in the Developer Dashboard

We noticed the “User Notes” feature in the Developer Dashboard got broken.

We have fixed the feature. Now you can add notes from the Users page (both from a product as well as from a store).

Other Improvements

• We updated the replyTo of the subscription cancellation emails to point to the user’s email address instead of the dont-reply. Now you can just reply to the email to follow up with the user.

Freemius Checkout

We noticed that in the Brave browser, the credit card field of our checkout app would become hidden due to configuration. We pushed a fix and the checkout app will now work on the Brave browser regardless of the browser’s configuration.

Improvements to the user email verification event

Your product will now receive the relevant user.email.verified event when a user verifies their email. You can process this event for marketing purposes.

This week’s deployment also brings various fixes to the Developer Dashboard.

Revealing the secret key on the Store Settings page

We had a UI issue on the Store Settings page where the secret key could not be revealed. Not only did we fix this issue, we also improved the UI in general.

From now on, the secret key will be hidden by default on every page that displays it. You can choose whether to reveal it or to copy it.

Other fixes/improvements

• The cache busting now works seamlessly when we deploy a new version of the Developer Dashboard app. Previously, some of our partners faced some issues.
• Fixed an edge case issue where the main pricing wouldn’t load properly on the pricing page.
• Fixed an issue where the earnings page could not be loaded directly from the bookmark.

We’ve implemented yet another feature request from our partners. From now on, you can mark a particular pricing as White Labeled. After doing that, every new license created for that pricing will be marked as White Labeled by default.

This means when someone activates the license on a site, the WP SDK will not show sensitive information on the Accounts page.

This helps in situations where you create some sort of bulk pricing for an agency and the agency wants the license marked as White Labeled by default. Please read more about the white-labeling feature here.

Freemius supports the Staged Rollouts feature, which allows you to gradually send your product updates to users. You can read more about it here.

We noticed in an edge case that if a site had already received a notification for an update — but the site admin didn’t choose to update immediately — the updates could fail later on because the “staged rollout” might have been completed since then.

In this iteration, we fixed these edge-case scenarios. The update will now fall back to the last stable release if such a case is encountered. We fixed this from our API layer. No changes to the WordPress SDK were necessary.

We’re pleased to announce a new feature we implemented following our partners’ feedback. It allows you to safely and securely load the Freemius Checkout app where the user’s name, email, VAT, country, ZIP Code/Postal Code, etc. are pre-populated.

High-level process

1. When the user clicks on the purchase button, make a call to YOUR backend.
2. Your backend will figure out the ID of the user and the ID of the product they’re trying to purchase.
3. The backend will call the Freemius API to generate a token.
4. The token will be given back to the JavaScript application that intercepted the ‘click’.
5. The JavaScript application will then open the Freemius checkout while passing the generated token as user_token in the configuration.

More details and code examples have been added to our documentation.

We noticed a small bug in the system where the integration code shown would be invalid right after creating a new product in the Developer Dashboard. This was especially prevalent in the section where it asks to put the testing constants in the wp-config.php file.

As part of our release this week, we’ve fixed this bug.

We found an issue in the analytics system where the ‘Trial cancellations’ metric wasn’t getting indexed. We fixed the issue and you should be able to see trial cancellations on the Sales Analytics page.

Added a new security email to the profile page

Following our last security disclosure, we received feedback from our partners that they would like the security emails to be sent to a separate address. In response, we have added a new section in the “Profile” page of the Developer Dashboard.

From here, you can add an email address where Freemius will send you security-related notifications. Please note that Freemius will send the notification to both the main email as well as the “Security email”.

Better UX for country pickers

Following yet another bit of feedback, we’ve improved the areas in the Developer Dashboard where we present a dropdown for selecting a country. For example:

• Billing Information
• Gifts & Surprises
• Payout Bank Account

etc.

As you can see, you can now easily search for the country you intend to pick.

We’re super excited to bring you the most-requested analytics feature in the Developer Dashboard.

Starting today:

• We’ve removed the restriction of selecting the date in the main dashboard.
• You can now pick any date range with any resolution (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) and both the start and end dates will be used when populating the data, without getting rounded off.
• The analytics charts are now faster than before.

The problem of rounding the date range

Previously, the server would round off the dates whenever you selected a date range that was not an hour or a day. For example:

• If you set the start date as 12 July and the end date as 25 December (with a monthly resolution), the server would round it off as data between 1 July and 31 December.
• Similarly, if you set the date to a weekly resolution, the server would round the start date to the first Sunday of the selected week and the end date to the last Saturday of the selected week.

This not only created confusion when viewing the charts and the UI (since they represented different dates), but we also had to restrict not showing the custom date picker in the main dashboard. This is because the rounded date range being shown there would not be the same as the selected dates.

Fixing the restriction of picking custom dates

After we enhanced the stats API, we can now provide data in any requested range and period that starts and/or ends at any date. The API will adjust the data to ensure it represents the requested date range instead of rounding it off.

As a result:

(1) The custom date picker in the main dashboard is back.

You can now get reports of aggregated data for any input.

(2) Charts and UI now correspond to the same date range.

As seen in the above image, the start date (and the data) of the chart now corresponds to the same date as the UI. To make it even easier to spot and avoid any confusion, we’re now showing the full date range when hovering over a chart point.

Under the hood: Making the charts faster

While working on the fix, we did some major refactoring of the underlying system. We realized we were doing many calculations ad-hoc and using more processing time than needed. During the refactoring, we made some adjustments and saw immediate improvements in the snappiness of the charts.

But no performance improvement is worth mentioning without a benchmark. So let’s see the results:

The benchmark itself was very simple. We took the main Net Payments & Transactions chart and hovered over the 7 data points while showing results for the last 7 days in Daily resolution. Co-incidentally, we also saw a 70% improvement in the rendering time 😁

Additional Fixes

Following upgrades of the dependencies, we noticed the New Bank Account… button on the Profile page was not working.

We fixed it in this iteration — apologies for any inconvenience!