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.
This week’s changelog comes with many new features in the Developer Dashboard.
After we introduced a “Foreign Exchange – USD” virtual currency to display transactional data on the new “Sales Analytics” page, we received a request to support other foreign exchange currencies too. This week, we are releasing that feature.
Apart from the “FX-USD”, you can convert your transactional data into any of the currencies Freemius supports.
Feedback from our partners made us realize that Subscriptions and Payments are the primary things one wants to see when accessing the Users page. It was hidden behind an accordion, which you had to click to view information.
To save you the hassle, those sections are now open by default and load as soon as the licenses are loaded.
Following many requests from our partners, we’ve implemented a self-service system to add or update “Bank Wire” payout methods in our Developer Dashboard.
Until now, our partners had to send us bank details manually if they wished to have payouts via bank wire. But with this update, you can do it yourself from the Developer Dashboard’s Profile page.
Go to My Profile at the top-right corner of the Developer Dashboard and scroll to the section that says Payout Method(s). Under the Payout Method column, you’ll find that selecting Bank Wire (or Wise) will open a popup where you can enter your bank details.
All of your details are saved securely in our server under heavy encryption.
At Freemius, we support selling in three currencies.
You can choose to…
You can set up three bank accounts if you’re selling in all three currencies.
We have imported data for all of our partners who are already using the wire payout. You will see the form already populated with the bank account details you shared with us.
Following feedback from many of our partners, we’re releasing a bunch of enhancements and fixes to the newly introduced Multi-store sidebar in our Developer Dashboard this week.
We are now showing the number of products associated with a store when browsing the STORES list.
This will indicate if a store has no product. We hope this will be useful for identifying ‘accidentally’ created stores that you may no longer want to use and would like to delete.
When creating a new product under a store, the sidebar will now show the Stores header with the Products page being highlighted to better reflect what status you’re in.
The add-ons will now appear with a better UI to indicate which product they are under.
Following feedback, we have started adding a tooltip to show the full name of the product when hovering. This is useful if you have many products with similar names that are ‘trimmed’ to accommodate the space.
When searching through products (which will only show up if you have more than 7 products), we now hide the Store title so that you can focus on the product names themselves.
/checkout/geo.json API endpoint.As another push to bring the Multi-store Developer Dashboard out of beta, we are glad to announce the following big features:
For those of you who are selling with multiple currencies, you’ll be glad to know that we’ve included a new feature in the Sales Analytics page to show all your transactions with a Foreign Exchange rate. Previously you could select only one currency at a time.
After getting some feedback from our partners, we have included a special “FX USD” currency which will take all your transactional data and convert the non-USD currencies with the current day’s exchange rates.
This has also been on our to-do list for a long time. Before taking the Multi-store Developer Dashboard out of beta, we wanted to make sure we are giving a simple and intuitive experience when switching between stores and products.
Following several rounds of feedback and many brainstorming sessions within the team, we’ve come up with a sleek tabular interface to list and switch between all your stores and products.
You can click on any of the tab buttons and it will show you the corresponding list. You may click on it again and it will toggle you back to the current view.
To make the date pickers in the analytics page more intuitive, we have made the following changes.
In the future, we want any resolution to support any date ranges. Right now. there are some limitations, for example:
We are working on a mechanism to fix this ASAP. Please stay tuned.
We noticed that the new Sales Analytics filter was neglecting any deleted plans, billing cycles, licenses, etc. For the time being, we are handling this by adding a new filter option called “Deleted Licenses” in all filters (checked by default, if any).
We are working on a robust solution to be able to see and filter through the deleted plans/licenses/billing cycles, etc.
After receiving feedback, we have implemented features to introduce a license unit in our User Dashboard and emails sent by Freemius. We’ve always associated licenses with ‘sites’ or ‘websites’ where they are active. We called it the same, for example: ‘Single-Site License’ or ‘5-Site License’, etc. But some of our partners required more and needed a way to customize it. For example, if one is selling licenses per user, then they may want to call it ‘5-User License’.
Given the usage, we didn’t feel we needed to introduce a system-wide configuration. Instead, we enabled the feature, and only when requested by a partner specifically. So if you need to customize the unit associated with a license, please get in touch with us by clicking the ‘Help’ button from the Developer Dashboard.
Following on from our previous release of “UX improvement in the new Product Form“, we’ve been developing a robust onboarding system for our new and existing partners.
The Freemius platform provides many features for our partners. There is a lot to explore: from email white-labeling and special coupons to automated marketing.
Up until now, developers had to figure out things for themselves without structured guidance. With this release, we are proud to announce that such a system is now available in our Beta Developer Dashboard.
On the bottom left of the product sidebar, please click on the new button Setup Checklist. This will take you to the page with instructions and actionable items for you to finish setting up your product.
If you don’t see this button, it simply means that your product is completely set up according to the recommended steps.
Depending on your product, you might see up to three checklist sections.
This is the bare minimum you’ll need to complete to make your product work with Freemius. Once you’ve finished it, the items will be automatically marked as checked.
You can also click on the grey Checkbox icon to temporarily dismiss an item. Once you finish the setup, the item will be marked as done by our system.
These are the steps to ‘while-label’ or ‘customize’ Freemius to behave like your existing website. For example, you might have a website domain https://my-awesome-plugin.com and would like Freemius to send emails from [email protected]. This list will show you how to do that.
Generally, these items are not mandatory and Freemius can work without them, but we highly recommend that you follow the walkthrough and finish setting them up.
You can click on the button on the right to dismiss an item.
These steps will help you get the most out of Freemius. Things like special coupons and the affiliate program appear here. Just as before, none of these steps are mandatory and you may dismiss any items you don’t want.
Do I need to complete all the steps to sell with Freemius?
All items apart from the Get Started list are optional. Please use the Setup Checklist page as a guide to understanding what you can do with Freemius. You are free to choose which items you want and can dismiss the items not relevant to you.
I dismissed an item but now I’d like to use it. Is there a way to access it?
Click on the Green Checkbox button again to reactivate the item. Or, you can simply follow the instruction and take the necessary steps. The item will be marked as done automatically.
I see some items crossed out with a green checkbox and I can’t click it. What’s up?
Those items are marked as ‘done’ by our system because you’ve already followed the required steps. Since there’s no point in toggling its status, it now appears as read-only.
Do I need to register a new product to start using this system?
Absolutely not. If you have a product with Freemius – no matter for how long – you will find the new button when you visit the product page from the Developer Dashboard. If the button is not appearing, it means your product is 100% set up.
/stores/ landing page was creating a broken layout in some instances.WordPress supports a special Requires PHP header in a plugin’s readme.txt file. If this has been implemented but the current web host is not running a compatible PHP version, WordPress blocks plugin updates.
Following feedback from our partners, we have added the same capability to our SDK and deployment strategy. If you include the Requires PHP header in your plugin’s readme.txt file, the SDK will show an appropriate notice on the update page and will block updates when needed.
You will also be able to see the new information under the Developer Dashboard’s Deployment page. We have added a new column: Min PHP Version.
The above feature will only work for new deployments as of today. Also, please note that you’ll need to update the Freemius SDK to v2.5.3 to fully utilize this feature.
We’ve always included a built-in support form in our User Dashboard. From there, a user can contact the developer directly if they have any product issues. The developer will receive an email in their support mailbox when contacted.
We recently received queries from our partners asking if there’s a way to direct users to a custom support page instead. We are pleased to announce that this feature has now been implemented.
From the Developer Dashboard, navigate to My Store by clicking on your profile icon at the top right.
On the My Store page, you’ll see a new input called Support Form. You can enter a valid URL there.
If you are using the Beta Developer Dashboard, go to the Store Settings page from the left-hand sidebar.
Once there, you’ll see the Support Form input.
After you’ve configured the custom Support Form URL, the user will see a Continue button when they open the User Dashboard and go to the Support menu. Clicking the Continue button will take them to the configured URL.