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.
With the release of the WP SDK 2.13, we introduced an option to customize the in-dashboard Checkout experience. Soon after, we learned that setting the layout to vertical caused a visual glitch that affected the background of the checkout form.
With this week’s deployment, the issue has been fully resolved. No changes are needed on your end as the fix is applied directly via our Checkout application.
Freemius always attempts to display a clear and verbose statement descriptor in your customers’ credit/debit card or bank statements. This helps buyers immediately recognize their purchase and avoid accidental disputes. The descriptor we try to show is:
FREEMIUS* PRODUCT_NAME
However, depending on the bank or card issuer, the soft descriptor may not always be supported. In those cases, our system falls back to a generic descriptor. With this week’s deployment, we are updating that fallback from FREEMIUS-PLUGIN-THEME to FREEMIUS SOFTWARE.
As more makers across different ecosystems started using Freemius beyond WordPress, the old descriptor no longer reflected the diversity of software being sold on the platform. This update ensures that the descriptor feels accurate and relevant regardless of the product type.
We initially attempted to use FREEMIUS SOFTWARE PAY, but the payment processors did not accept it, so we adopted FREEMIUS SOFTWARE instead.
Please note that Freemius will continue trying to use the soft descriptor FREEMIUS* PRODUCT_NAME first, and only fall back to the generic descriptor when the payment provider does not support it. This update is also reflected in the transactional emails sent from our system.
This week we are releasing version 1.4.1 of the Checkout JS SDK.
This update addresses an issue in the automatic dunning recovery flow, where in certain cases the library failed to correctly restore the payment-method update experience.
Since this flow is critical for recovering failed subscriptions, we prioritized fixing it to keep the recovery process as seamless as possible for both you and your customers.
If you’re using the CDN version, nothing needs to be changed on your end. For NPM package users, please update with the following command:
npm install @freemius/checkout@latest
This week we’re rolling out some improvements to the Subscription Cancellation email sent by Freemius.
This email is sent to the product maker whenever a customer cancels their subscription. It includes important information like customer details, subscription information, and any associated sites where the corresponding license was in use.
To make the layout more compact and easier to digest, we’ve moved the sites section below the subscription details and now show only the first five sites instead of the full list. A link is provided to the Developer Dashboard where you can filter and view all affected websites.
For most products, listing five sites is more than enough. But for large multi-site networks, the earlier version often generated a very lengthy table that could cut the email short or make it harder to navigate. With this update, the email remains clean, readable, and focused on the essential information.
We’ve just released version 2.13.0 of the Freemius WordPress SDK — packed with developer-focused enhancements and improvements to existing integrations. For the complete changelog and implementation details, check out the GitHub release notes. Or read below for a quick summary of what’s new in this release.
Two new hooks — after_license_activation and after_license_deactivation — are now available, allowing developers to respond to license status changes more efficiently. This makes it easier to sync external systems or trigger custom workflows when licenses are activated or deactivated.
To make transaction details clearer for customers, payments in the Accounts page now display the Gross amount (including taxes) instead of the Net amount.
We’ve introduced a new filter, checkout/parameters, that lets you fine-tune the Checkout experience — such as forcing social proofing UI or billing cycle selectors. This is especially handy for custom pricing pages or dynamic checkout links.
For if you include the following code in your plugin
The SDK will now render the Checkout with the proper UI like below:
The SDK now includes the latest version 1.3.0 of our Pricing Page App, featuring a fix for annual discount calculations and enhanced security badges.
The SDK now fully supports the new InstaWP staging environment, automatically switching to safe mode when cloned, ensuring smoother workflows for testing and staging sites.
Not so long ago, we introduced a feature to set up a custom recovery URL for payment recovery. This helps prevent confusion among buyers who might otherwise see a different domain when updating their payment methods.
The process required going to the Developer Dashboard, setting up a URL, and ensuring that the Freemius Checkout JS SDK was included on that webpage.
However, based on feedback from our makers, we realized that testing this integration wasn’t straightforward. Since this flow involves recovering failed subscriptions, it’s only natural that our makers wanted an easy way to validate it.
To address this, we’ve added a new “Test Payment Recovery” button in the UI. Clicking it will open the configured URL, automatically triggering the Freemius Checkout with a dummy payment recovery flow.
If the test checkout appears as expected, you can be confident that your integration works correctly.
Regardless of whether you’ve already set it up, head over to Developer Dashboard → Plans → Customization to try it out.
We identified a small bug in our Customer Portal where, in the Affiliate Application Form, every product was incorrectly referred to as a “plugin” regardless of its actual type. This caused confusion, particularly for non-WordPress products like SaaS and Apps.
We’ve now fixed this issue so the form correctly reflects the product type. If you’re a maker looking to grow your sales through affiliate marketing, you can explore how Freemius helps you with a built-in affiliate platform.
Following feedback from our makers community, we are releasing several improvements to the customer invoices this week.
For SaaS & Apps, it didn’t make sense to include the slug of a product in the invoice title. While the slug helps identify WordPress products, it only added confusion for other product types. With this change, the invoice header is now cleaner and more relevant for SaaS & Apps.
We’ve made the product URL smarter in the invoice. It will now first try to use the URL from the product settings.
If no product URL is defined, it will fall back to the store URL and, finally, to the maker’s billing information. This makes the invoice better aligned with the actual product context, instead of defaulting to the general billing address as before.
We noticed a bug where the item description wasn’t showing custom license unit labels for App & SaaS product types.
This has now been fixed, ensuring that invoices clearly display what the customer purchased, with accurate and dynamic unit labels.
This week we’re rolling out several quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes to the Developer Dashboard.
We noticed an edge-case bug where updating the store icon sometimes reverted it back to the default one.
This issue has now been fixed, ensuring your store icon remains exactly as configured.
We found that certain labels, such as “One-off” for one-time purchases, and the dynamic unit labels, were not being displayed correctly in the coupon configuration pane.
A fix has been deployed, and the UI now properly reflects your configuration—removing confusion around pricing units and coupon applicability.
We also addressed a bug where filtering by status did not work correctly for events listed under the Stores page.
Filtering now works as expected, making it easier to locate relevant event data at a glance.
To make onboarding even smoother, we’ve added a new video walkthrough to the Developer Dashboard. It appears when a product setup hasn’t yet completed its critical steps.
The walkthrough demonstrates how quickly and easily you can integrate any type of product with Freemius and highlights the setup checklist page—helping makers complete their integration process efficiently.
We’re excited to share the official release of the Freemius for WordPress plugin — a community-built initiative by Xaver, the creator of Mailster. Developed independently and supported by Freemius, the plugin makes it incredibly easy to integrate the Freemius Checkout and other components into your WordPress site. Watch the short video below to explore its features.
If you’re selling your WordPress product with Freemius, then besides the built-in WP SDK Checkout, we’ve always recommended embedding a pricing page on your own marketing website using the Freemius Checkout JS SDK. However, this required writing and maintaining the integration code manually.
With the Freemius for WordPress plugin, you no longer have to. If your theme supports blocks, you can turn any button into a Freemius Checkout button and configure all available options right from the editor. You can also integrate Freemius Checkout with any pricing table or layout pattern that comes with your theme.
To make this even easier for our makers, we’ve added a new step in the Setup Checklist inside the Developer Dashboard that explains the plugin’s role and how it fits into your setup.
Additionally, you’ll now find instructions for using the plugin inside the Get Checkout Code dialog accessible from the Plans page.
You can learn more in our documentation.
Even if your product itself isn’t built on WordPress, as long as your marketing site runs on WordPress, you can use this plugin to easily integrate Freemius Checkout and other components.
We’re just getting started with this plugin. In upcoming releases, we plan to introduce more features such as embedding the Customer Portal, providing SSO login options, and unifying all these capabilities into a single, robust plugin for WordPress makers.
Freemius’ robust licensing system allows activating a license on a WordPress product that isn’t owned by the website owner. This is particularly useful for agencies that manage client sites, as they can install and manage licenses on behalf of their clients. To maintain privacy, agencies often enable whitelabel mode to hide license keys and other sensitive information from the WordPress SDK.
However, depending on how the client initially installed the product, the same license could sometimes appear as a “foreign license” under the client’s own Customer Portal account.
In such cases, the portal previously displayed the license and allowed actions like upgrading the plan or updating the payment method—actions that should have been restricted.
In this week’s deployment, we’ve addressed and fixed this privacy issue.
Now, license keys associated with foreign licenses will remain hidden. The only available action for clients will be to change the license, matching the limited actions available from within the WordPress SDK.
We appreciate our makers for reporting this. While the issue posed no direct security risk, it did raise valid privacy concerns, especially in agency-client setups.
Our Customer Portal includes an upsell section that helps nudge customers to purchase additional licenses. When customers view an installed product under their website, they can see their license utilization and, right beside it, have the option to buy more licenses.
Some makers shared that when opening and closing the checkout from this upsell button, the exit intent UX was being triggered — which felt counterintuitive since the exit-intent flow was designed to encourage new purchases, not upsells.
Taking this feedback into account, we’ve now disabled the exit intent coupon behavior in the Customer Portal, ensuring a smoother and more intentional upsell experience.
This week we’re super glad to announce the immediate availability of our fully redesigned customer emails, refreshed with new brand guidelines and a modernized layout.
If you’ve customized your email design and would like to update, scroll down to the “Migrating From the Old Design” section below.
Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been gradually refreshing legacy designs across Freemius, and today marks another huge milestone.
We had already kickstarted the email rebranding earlier and completed the redesign of all maker-facing emails. Starting today, all customer-facing emails have also been fully rebuilt — and the new design continues to offer the same rich Email Customizer experience you’re familiar with.
The new email designs bring a cleaner, more modern experience for your customers. We’ve taken special care to emphasize key CTAs (call-to-actions) and improve the visual hierarchy with clear section headings for better readability.
You can explore the new design right now by going to Email Style Customization under your store settings.
If you’ve previously customized your email design, you won’t be automatically upgraded. But upgrading is simple and takes just one click.
All your existing customizations will be automatically migrated to the new system, making the transition seamless.
If you prefer the older style, you can click the “Switch Back to Legacy” button at any time to revert—without losing your configuration.
Please note that while the legacy design will remain temporarily available, we plan to phase it out soon.
We encourage you to migrate early to take advantage of the new design improvements. If you have any questions or encounter any issues, please reach out to our support team—we’ll be happy to help.
Today we’re releasing version 0.1.0 of our JavaScript SDK. We’ve received valuable feedback from our makers, and this release focuses on addressing those, fixing a few bugs, and improving cross-platform compatibility. To update, simply run:
npm install @freemius/sdk@latest
Please find the key changes below.
In some serverless or managed environments, the raw request body may get automatically altered (e.g., by trimming whitespace), which could cause signature verification failures.
To resolve this, we’ve introduced an alternative webhook authentication method that retrieves the event directly from the Freemius API using the event ID included in the webhook payload.
You can read more about the change in our documentation.
Breaking Change: The freemius.webhook.createListener method now accepts a configuration object.
You can now initiate checkout flows for upgrading existing licenses simply by passing a license ID. This simplifies handling upgrades for existing customers and makes the flow more consistent with the rest of the SDK.
Read our documentation to learn more about the upgrade flow.
Breaking Changes:
checkout.setSandbox() now expects sandbox parameters (created via await freemius.checkout.getSandboxParams()).setLicenseRenewal has been renamed to setLicenseUpgradeByKey for clarity and consistency.We’ve added full support for free trial flows across both overlay and hosted checkout modes. This allows for smoother onboarding experiences for products offering free trials—without the need for separate integration logic.
You can read our updated guide for more details. The same integration flow now works seamlessly for free trials too.
We will update our entitlement guide supporting trials soon.
We identified an issue where the Checkout API processor was incorrectly validating the action URL parameter, and the timingSafeEqual function could throw errors on malformed signatures. Both issues have now been fixed to ensure smoother and more reliable redirection-based checkouts.
Check out our live-coding webinar where we’ve built a SaaS app and integrate it with Freemius using the new JavaScript SDK + React Starter Kit – from setup to checkout in under 30 minutes. Watch the webinar replay
We are releasing a new version 1.4.0 of our Checkout JavaScript SDK. This update introduces proper type support for Free Trial flows.
Previously, in the success callback, you couldn’t access structured data when a free trial was triggered. With this release, the data is now available under the data.trial property with full type annotations, making it easier to build consistent post-trial experiences.
Please note that this enhancement applies only to free trials. For paid trials, you should continue using the data.purchase property.
If you’re using the CDN version, no action is required — the update is already live. For NPM installations, please upgrade by running:
npm install @freemius/checkout@latest
For more details, please visit our GitHub repository.