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 have enhanced the newly introduced VAT Refund feature. After making the refund, in the system, we mark the original payment as fully refunded, and then we create a new payment without the VAT while giving a refund to the customer.
Previously you had to click on the “Refunds” or “All” filter to see all three transactions.
But now, the three transactions will appear under the “Not Refunded” filter right out of the box.
We’ve done a minor enhancement to the charts UI in the Developer Dashboard.
While hovering on a point, if the selected date range spans over different years, the UI will show the full year of the given node. This helps quickly understand which year the point falls on.
We saw a regression in our latest upgrade of Freemius Deployment. If a PHP file was written with CRLF (Windows) line-ending, then the system added additional line spaces in block comments.
For example, the following block comment:
/** * The main plugin file. * @since 1.0 * @package MyAwesomePlugin */
was becoming
/** * The main plugin file. * @since 1.0 * @package MyAwesomePlugin */
While this did not break any functionality, we’ve made a quick fix to prevent this from happening.
We got a report where a user, in an edge case, could accidentally re-purchase a lifetime license from our Checkout. They already had a lifetime license for a particular plan. Then they accidentally entered that license key for “upgrade” to the same plan and therefore got charged again.
In this iteration, we have fixed this behavior by simply blocking it from happening. The UI will also show a proper message to the user asking to choose a different number of licenses.
Freemius supports Special Coupons & Discounts, the Exit Intent Coupon. This coupon helps in conversion by providing a coupon right when the user is about to abandon the checkout.
We noticed that the checkout was showing a negative countdown timer if the coupon had an expiration set from the Developer Dashboard and if the coupon had already expired.
The expiration date of any coupon can be set from the Developer Dashboard as shown in the screenshot above.
In this deployment, we have fixed this. If the exit intent coupon expires, it will no longer be applied.
Also like before, if the coupon expires in the future, then the FOMO counter will count down to the expiration date of the coupon.
We noticed a regression in the Email Styler, where the color picker was not working.
We have fixed this bug. Additionally, we have also improved cache busting in our template loader mechanism.
This has been one of the big feature requests from our partners. Being a merchant of record, Freemius handles taxes for EU/UK customers on behalf of our partners.
Sometimes a customer would purchase a product and forget to enter their VAT number. In such cases, the customer will not get any tax exemption. Later the customer could contact the developer asking for a VAT refund.
So far, the only way to do this is to cancel the original subscription or lifetime purchase and recreate it to ensure the customer properly puts their VAT number.
To ease the process, Freemius now supports VAT refunds against a valid VAT number, right out of the box.
Navigate to the “Payments” section of your Developer Dashboard and click on the “Refund” button. You will find a new option to do a “Tax refund”.
Not only have we enhanced the user experience for buyers and simplified the process for you, but we’ve also devised a behind-the-scenes implementation that ensures you won’t lose the gateway fee for the entire transaction. Instead, you’ll only forfeit a partial percentage of the VAT. This not only streamlines the entire process but also saves you money.
Please note that
The option to do a tax refund will only show up if the associated payment has a tax. If you don’t see this option, it simply means Freemius did not collect any taxes for that payment.
It is worth mentioning that the process will
This will also be reflected in the Developer Dashboard after you’ve done a tax refund.
Version Deployment is one of the powerful tools Freemius provides to our Software makers to ease their lives. The concept is simple; wrap your code in if ( my_fs()->is__premium_only() ) family of methods and Freemius will strip out the premium code to make a WordPress.org-compliant free version of your WordPress theme or plugin.
So far, this feature has been limited to parsing PHP 7.1 code. With today’s update, you can start using PHP syntax up to version 8.2 and our deployment mechanism will properly strip off premium codes.
We have also made subtle improvements to the prettifier. It will now output code closer to WordPress formatting standards.
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.