Year in Review 2024

As I reflect on 2024, I’m proud of how far we’ve come. It’s been a year of great accomplishments, but not without challenges. As our team grew, some processes that worked seamlessly began to crumble. What got us here wouldn’t necessarily get us ahead, so we had to rethink, adapt, and experiment.

2024 was also a year of a lot of firsts for us. We launched bold new initiatives, ran exciting experiments, and began expanding beyond the WordPress ecosystem, laying the foundation for a broader vision of Freemius’ future. At the same time, we got our growth trajectory back on track, proving what’s possible with resilience, creativity, and hard work.

If you’re curious about how we tackled growth, overcame challenges, and set the stage for an even bigger 2025, stick around — there’s a lot to unpack. Let’s dive in!

Team Growth, Resilience, and Doubling-Down on Inbound Leads

The Freemius team saw some changes! We welcomed 8 new team members across various roles (engineering, video, brand, marketing, and social media), each bringing unique talents and perspectives that enriched our company’s diverse culture and capabilities (we now have members in 5 continents and 11 countries). At the same time, 4 colleagues departed for various personal and professional reasons. While transitions are always challenging, they’re inevitable.

Dealing with a Tragedy

One event that deeply impacted our team was the unexpected and tragic passing of Johan, our beloved Social Media Manager. Navigating such a surreal and emotional experience as a leader and as a team is something you cannot prepare for. It tested our resilience and brought us closer together. Through shared grief and support, we emerged stronger and more united, honoring Johan’s legacy in the way we collaborate and care for each other.

Aligned Time Zones for Success

Reflecting on this year’s growth, I was reminded of the importance of time zone alignment for leadership roles requiring close collaboration. Despite past lessons, I took a chance on a candidate who was an exceptional fit for the Head of Community role but worked from a distant time zone. The limitations of asynchronous communication ultimately made it impossible to deliver at the expected pace as I became the bottleneck for most initiatives. For us, this experience reinforced the need for time zone compatibility in high-touch roles.

A-Players Attract A-Players

Additionally, one of the most effective strategies for successful hiring has been leveraging warm leads from within our team. This year, 5 out of our 8 new hires were individuals with whom either I or another team member had a prior relationship. These pre-established connections significantly increased the likelihood of successful integration and alignment. A-players attract A-players, and this year’s hires have proven that principle once again.

Revamped All-Hands Meeting for More Efficiency

In 2024, as Freemius’s team nearly doubled in size from 12 to 20 members, our traditional all-hands meetings became too long and less effective, stretching to almost 2 hours. 🤯

After experimenting with different formats and letting different team members lead meetings for six weeks, we decided to completely reinvent our approach.

The new format combines lightning rounds for personal connection, structured department updates with visual presentations, and dedicated time for company-wide initiatives – all packed into a more engaging and efficient meeting that keeps everyone aligned and inspired.

We Are Hiring!

We’re actively hiring for several key roles: two senior full-stack developers, a technical support engineer, an influencer marketing manager, an offline video editor, and an experienced creative designer.

Vacancies notwithstanding, we are always on the lookout for smart and talented people to join the team. If you’re an A-player who thrives in a distributed, multicultural environment and connects with our mission to help software makers succeed while doing what they love — we’d love to hear from you! 📞👂

Reach out at careers AT freemius DOT com and tell us how you can contribute. We’ve created roles for the right people before and have a proven model to ensure you’ll have a lasting place on our team.

Business Growth By The Numbers

To ensure the data isn’t skewed, the analysis below considers only makers who crossed $1,000 in sales volume during the relevant year. This approach provides a clearer and more accurate picture of trends, highlighting the growth and success of active makers on the platform.

Revenue Growth: Reflecting on the Numbers and Setting Ambitious Goals

Over the years, Freemius has experienced remarkable growth, especially during our first five years, where we saw consistent 3-digit YoY growth.

Some of the most significant leaps occurred during 2020 and 2021.Like many technology companies, we benefited from the surge in digitalization as COVID-19 forced businesses to adapt and move online. This wave of transformation drove substantial growth in eCommerce, particularly benefiting plugins and themes.

In 2022, however, things slowed down as the global economy tightened and markets crashed, resulting in a modest growth rate of 8.24%. Fortunately, the trajectory started improving in 2023, with a return to double-digit growth. We’ve continued this upward trend in 2024 with a growth rate of 17.76%.

Looking ahead, I’ve set a bold and ambitious goal for the team: to 3x our revenue in the next 3 years.

While I know this is challenging, I have full confidence in our talented team and the innovative strategies we’re implementing to achieve this milestone. Together, we’re laying the groundwork for sustained growth and success.

Inventory Growth: Expanding the Ecosystem

Every single day, a new software product makes its first sale through Freemius 🥳️— a testament to our platform’s impact in helping makers succeed and bring innovative software to market.

As our product inventory grows into the thousands, the pace of growth has naturally slowed. This is a normal part of our platform’s maturation, but it also presents a valuable opportunity to look ahead.

With our expansion into supporting SaaS and apps, I’m optimistic that the inventory growth trajectory will pick up again. By opening our platform to a broader range of products and business models, we aim to drive a new wave of makers to join Freemius, expanding the ecosystem even further.

Revenue Per Software Maker: Highlighting Success Stories

A software maker on Freemius now earns an average of $43,000 annually, showcasing the platform’s ability to generate meaningful revenue for independent developers and small teams. This number peaked during the COVID boom in 2021 at nearly $44k, followed by a dip in 2022 as the global economy slowed down. However, it’s encouraging to see this number rise again, highlighting the resilience of makers on the platform.

Our top-tier makers are achieving incredible success, with some earning over $700k per year. It’s particularly exciting to note that this level of performance now surpasses the highs experienced during the COVID-driven eCommerce boom. Each year, we’re not only growing alongside our makers but also attracting larger indie-makers and established software companies to trust Freemius to fuel their growth.

Maker Expansion: Doubling Down on Freemius

Over the years, the average number of products sold by a maker through Freemius has increased by 3.6x. In 2016, the average maker sold just 1.6 products. Today, that number has risen to an impressive 5.7 products per maker.

This steady growth reflects the trust makers place in Freemius as their “go-to” solution for selling software. By expanding their product portfolios and continuing to rely on the platform, makers are doubling down on Freemius as a reliable and scalable solution to power their businesses.

Product & Engineering: Driving Innovation and Delivery

In 2024, the Product & Engineering teams worked tirelessly to enhance Freemius, delivering over 100 platform features and updates — all meticulously documented in our changelog.

We pushed 8 releases of the WP SDK, launched a new Lite WP SDK, graduated the new Pricing Page out of beta, and released the Checkout JS SDK to streamline checkout experiences for developers.

Here are some of the new shiny things that we shipped:

Checkout 2.0: Elevating the Buyer Experience

In 2024, we launched Checkout 2.0 with a sleek, modern design optimized for performance and user experience. The new version features automatic currency detection, dynamic pricing display, and improved localization for a truly global shopping experience.

We’ve reduced load times by 40%, ensuring the checkout appears almost instantly after clicking the buy button.

Data Liberation: Empowering Makers with Full Control

Inspired by Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” keynote, we launched the Data Liberation project to give makers full ownership of their data.

With one click, makers can now export licenses, payments, subscriptions, users, websites, and affiliate payouts, enabling custom analytics and enhanced marketing segmentation.

Thanks to performance optimizations led by Dror Yaakov, export times have been reduced by 600% – visit our release notes to learn more about this breakthrough.

Expanding Freemius for SaaS and Apps

We’ve transformed Freemius to better serve SaaS and app makers with a dedicated SaaS product type, enhanced checkout functionality, and customizable after-purchase experiences.

The new Checkout JS SDK, built with vanilla JavaScript, loads 60% faster than the Legacy version, while our growing API documentation now covers around 50 endpoints.

For detailed information about these improvements and our SaaS-specific features, check out our release notes.

Localization: Breaking Language Barriers

We officially launched our localization feature with professional translations in Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, and French.

The enhanced language selector now includes country flags that dynamically adapt based on the buyer’s location, creating a more personalized experience.

Lite WP SDK: A Lightweight Solution for WordPress Makers

Led by Daniele Alessandra in collaboration with Benjamin Intal from Stackable, we introduced the beta version of our Lite WP SDK.

This streamlined solution focuses on essential functionalities like software licensing and automatic updates, perfect for makers seeking a lightweight implementation.

Excellence in Technical Customer Support

We resolved 2,241 technical support tickets! While we’ve grown the number of actively selling makers on the platform by 23%, the number of tickets has reduced by 16% compared to last year.

This decrease reflects the increasing stability of our platform, driven by proactive bug fixes, improved UX, and enhanced documentation. It also highlights the value of having a developer as the lead support.

Our Technical Support Lead, Leo Fajardo, has been instrumental in identifying the most frequent issues and addressing them programmatically, through documentation, or by bringing them to the attention of the product team.

Out of 158 ratings, 96% of customers rated our support as “Great”, showing a 2% improvement over last year. While 6 interactions were rated as “Not good” and one as “Okay,” the overwhelmingly positive feedback speaks to the dedication and care our support team provides.

That said, as ticket complexity rose higher, we’ve identified an increase in response and resolution times. Our Time to First Response grew by an hour to 7 hours, and the average Resolution Time rose by 27%. These metrics indicate areas for improvement as we continue striving for excellence.

To address this, Laurence Bahiirwa, one of our talented developers, successfully completed his training program and is now actively taking support tickets in a 50% role capacity. His addition is already making a positive impact on our support operations.

Huge kudos to Leo Fajardo for his exceptional leadership and dedication to providing top-notch support to our customers.. His commitment to continuous improvement sets the bar high for technical customer service.

From 1.1 to 4.5: Transforming Our Google Reviews

Earlier in the year, our poor Google Reviews rating was brought to my attention. The team explained that improving this score should be one of our main priorities. I initially dismissed the initiative in favor of focusing on our strong G2 presence. We have 60 reviews there, averaging 4.7 stars.

The wake-up call came when a potential customer in Envato’s Elite Authors Slack community dismissed Freemius based solely on our 1.1-star Google rating, showing how surface-level perceptions can significantly impact credibility.

In May, we launched a focused strategy to improve our Google Reviews by asking satisfied makers to share their experiences. In less than seven months, we transformed our profile from 4 reviews averaging 1.1 stars to 44 reviews averaging 4.5 stars.

Stability and Reliability: The Foundation of Trust

While other platforms have struggled with outages, checkout issues, and broken webhooks — causing massive disruptions to the software fulfillment process — we’re proud to say that Freemius has delivered unparalleled stability and reliability in 2024.

Our checkout and customer portal achieved 100% uptime throughout the year! The API — our Developer Dashboard — achieved an impressive 99.99% availability.

Freemius has been THE most reliable Merchant of Record in 2024 💪

A payment solution must, first and foremost, never fail in processing money. If the checkout is down, payments fail, or customers don’t get immediate access to their software after purchase, directly impacting your bottom line. We’re proud to consistently deliver on this promise, proving that our investment in quality code reviews, unit testing, and CI/CD processes continues to pay dividends.

A huge shoutout to our CTO, Dror Yaakov, and VP of Engineering, Swashata Ghosh, for leading our engineering team to excellence. Their commitment to quality and reliability sets a high standard that few can match.

A New Chapter for Our Brand in 2024

Last year, I realized it was time to refresh our visual brand identity. The Freemius logo—designed over 10 years ago—was born from a simple idea: “Let’s make a cool logo that developers will like; something futuristic, maybe inspired by Star Wars.” That was it.

Over the years, without a formal design brand book, our website and assets became a mix of different design iterations created by various designers who contributed at different stages.

Long story short, I began interviewing designers for the visual rebrand. As someone without a background in brand design and unsure of what to look for, I reached out to Elementor’s senior brand manager — whom I’d built a relationship with at WordCamps — for guidance on the hiring process.

One thing led to another, and by sheer timing and connection, Hadas Golzaker came into the picture.

She helped me understand that branding is more than just design, helping me realize that I’d unknowingly been doing a lot of “branding” all along without recognizing it

With our expansion beyond WordPress into SaaS, the timing couldn’t have been better for a rebrand.

It turned out to be my fastest hiring decision ever — we high-fived after 40 minutes, and, to be honest, we were both a bit shocked.

Hiring Tip: I realized that asking for feedback from people you respect can lead to great hires. It builds relationships ahead of time, gives you insight into their thought process, and allows them to envision themselves working with you.

After Hadas joined Freemius, we kicked off a full-blown rebranding process. This wasn’t just about visuals — it was about rediscovering who we truly are.

We started with in-depth workshops to define our Brand Strategy by building a tone, personality, and identity that reflects Freemius’ essence.

The highlights of our rebrand journey include:

A completely new logo and swag symbolizing the three stages of software makers: launch, growth, and scale.

Shifting our terminology to refer to our community as “software makers” instead of “partners”—a change validated by a poll within the community.
Saying goodbye (or as Hadas insists, retiring) our beloved mascot, Freebo, who is apparently now living his best life in Miami.
Propagating our new visual identity incrementally across all assets while aligning our style, tone, and personality in content, video, social media, and communication.

This process wasn’t just a visual refresh — it allowed us to realign Freemius with its purpose and future.

As we expand into new markets, our rebrand ensures that Freemius reflects the innovation, professionalism, and growth we enable for software makers worldwide.

Celebrating 10 Years: Our First-Ever Brand Campaign

As Freemius’ 10th anniversary approached, I started thinking about what we could do — not just for ourselves, but for our makers’ community and perhaps even the greater good. My initial idea was to have a “No Fees” day on our birthday, where makers would get to keep 100% of their sales. It felt like a great way to give back to the people who’ve been with us on this journey.

I pitched the idea to a few peers at WordCamp Europe, and while the reaction was positive, my friend James Giroux offered an inspiring suggestion: why not elevate it into a “pay it forward” campaign? Instead of just waiving fees, we could direct that energy toward something even more meaningful and make a broader impact.

The resulting campaign was both simple and powerful: Freemius donated 7% of every sale made during our 10th-anniversary day to Girls Who Code, a nonprofit dedicated to closing the gender gap in tech. We chose Girls Who Code because their mission aligns so closely with our values: empowering creators, fostering inclusivity, and investing in the future of technology.

The results were incredible. As detailed in our 10th-anniversary campaign article and its follow-up campaign results, the Freemius community came together to drive remarkable success:

Total sales during the campaign exceeded expectations.
Makers embraced the initiative and were proud to contribute to such a meaningful cause.

This first-ever brand campaign marked a milestone for Freemius — not just as a celebration of our past decade but as a statement of who we are and what we stand for: a community-driven platform dedicated to empowering makers and paying it forward.

Growing Freemius’ Community and Fostering Connections

This year marked significant milestones in our efforts to nurture and grow the Freemius maker community, reinforcing our commitment to supporting software creators worldwide.

Community Strategy: Early in 2024, we laid the groundwork for a comprehensive community strategy. This included a roadmap of initiatives to foster collaboration and mutual growth among our members as the community scales.
First Community Product Review: We launched our first-ever community “Product Review” session on the #give-get-feedback Slack channel, featuring Smart Auto Featured Image by Michael Andre from WP Joli. The initiative invited community participants to provide feedback on marketing, business, and UI/UX. The response was phenomenal, with members going above and beyond to share detailed feedback, record videos, and offer pages of insights. The success of this initiative encouraged 13 more members to sign up for future product reviews, which we plan to resume as soon as we find a new community lead.
Growing Our Slack Community: The Freemius Slack community — an invite-only space for software makers — crossed 1.6k members this year. We’re excited about its continued growth and are optimistic about reaching 2k members by the end of 2025.

Makers Meetup: Bringing the Community Together

This year, we hosted two flagship Maker Meetup events, creating opportunities for software makers to connect, network, and share experiences in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.

🇹🇼 Freemius Makers’ Meetup Taipei at WordCamp Asia 2024
🇮🇹 Freemius Makers’ Meetup Torino at WordCamp Europe 2024

The events were led byour Head of Brand, Hadas Golzaker, who took the experience to new heights. With her professional touch, the meetups featured engaging activities to drive amplification on social media, stylish swag, and polished looks that aligned perfectly with our brand.

Under Hadas’s leadership, the Maker Meetups looked more professional and felt more engaging and impactful than ever before.

These events have become a cornerstone of our community efforts, and we’re excited to keep building on their success in the years to come. The Freemius Makers’ Meetup Philippines at WordCamp Asia is already in the works, and Basel will likely be next during WordCamp Europe.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sales Performance: A Strong Year for Campaigns

This year, Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales on Freemius saw a remarkable 29% growth compared to last year, based on sales occurring from the week before until the week after Black Friday.

To get a clearer picture and eliminate the impact of our inventory growth, we analyzed the change in the average sales per product during the BFCM period.

This analysis reveals that on average, products this year yielded 15.31% more revenue compared to 2023, highlighting the growing effectiveness of strategic discounts and campaigns.

There’s a wealth of fascinating insights to be drawn from Freemius’ BFCM data, and we plan to dive deeper into these trends in a dedicated article coming in 2025. A massive shoutout to Scott for leading the efforts in our BFCM campaign!

Celebrating 10 Years: Our Portugal Retreat

In September, we gathered in Ericeira, Portugal, for a team retreat to celebrate our 10th anniversary — a significant milestone that provided an opportunity to reflect on our journey and strategize for the future.

This retreat was particularly special as it brought together our globally distributed team, many meeting in person for the first time.

The retreat began with a presentation where I shared Freemius’ evolution over the past decade, diving into key milestones, lessons learned, and our journey through insightful data and thought-provoking charts.

We explored the “why” behind our mission, uncovering the shared passion that drives us as a team. This led to discussions about our collective vision for the next five years, aligning it with both our dedication to the mission and our aspirations for personal growth.

Beyond the strategic discussions, the retreat was filled with activities that strengthened our team bonds and created lasting memories. We visited the magical town of Sintra, ventured into the ocean for paddleboarding, savored wine tastings, and indulged in the rich flavors of Portuguese cuisine.

The retreat also gave us the space to share personal milestones, step outside our comfort zones, and deepen our connections with one another.

The Portugal retreat was a defining moment for Freemius, solidifying our unity and igniting our ambition as we set a clear and inspiring path forward for the next chapter of our journey: becoming the “Go-to Solution for Selling Software”.

Marketing: A New Take That Brought Results

While other areas of the business experienced consistent growth, marketing in 2023 faced significant challenges. Organic traffic had plateaued for months, and it was clear that a fresh approach was needed to reignite momentum.

In Q4 of 2023, we made a pivotal hire: Goran Mirković joined Freemius as our new CMO. With extensive experience in content marketing and SEO, he quickly dove into analyzing and overhauling our marketing strategy.

The findings were eye-opening. For years, we had been focused on producing new content almost every week but had largely neglected the maintenance and optimization of the rich library we’d already built. With over 100 blog posts live on our site, a significant portion had fallen victim to content decay, generating little to no traffic or conversions. In short, we thought we knew what we were doing, but we kind of sucked at SEO.

We also lacked a clear content strategy. Foundational SEO practices — like creating pillar pages, building structured content hubs, and prioritizing internal linking — had been overlooked.

Goran introduced a two-pronged strategy to turn things around:

Reviving Existing Content: He tackled content decay by updating, expanding, and optimizing older posts to make them relevant, useful, and impactful again.
Implementing a Hub-and-Spoke Framework: New content is now built around pillar pages, strengthening internal linking, improving site structure, and driving targeted organic traffic.

This renewed focus on quality, strategy, and SEO fundamentals set the stage for a remarkable turnaround in 2024, breathing new life into our marketing efforts and laying a solid foundation for sustainable growth.

To support these efforts, Goran brought on Stefana, a Content Marketing and SEO Specialist, to help manage the increased workload. Alongside older content team members Robert and Scott, the team delivered impressive results: we refreshed 25 outdated blog posts and created 42 new ones in 2024, almost doubling our throughput from 2023. That’s a new article almost every week!

The impact of these efforts has been remarkable. Compared to 2023, on the marketing side, this year has been awesome for Freemius. Here’s what the numbers show:

Organic clicks grew by 180%
Google impressions increased by 160%
Click-through rate (CTR) improved by 8%
Active users grew by 34%
Engaged sessions soared by 102%
Engagement rate climbed by 19.5%
Average engagement per session improved by 21%
Our domain rating (DR) increased by 1 point, helping us build authority in our niche.
We also secured 2,000 new organic keyword rankings, further expanding our reach in search.

Here’re the top 10 performing new articles we published in 2024 that contributed to these impressive numbers:

Beyond the numbers, 2024 was also a year of experimentation and new initiatives in our marketing efforts:

Monthly product releases content:
This year, we introduced a new format for product updates, transforming technical changelog entries into engaging, benefit-driven narratives. These updates focus on explaining how new features and improvements help our users better utilize our product.
Experimenting with our newsletter:
We took a bold step in reimagining our newsletter, experimenting with its content and format to better engage our audience. From including more actionable insights to diversifying the content types, the goal has been to make our emails a must-read for our audience. While it’s still a work in progress, we’ve already seen promising improvements in open and engagement rates. Kudos to Hadas, Scott, and MJ for leading the change here!
Content translations to Spanish:
As part of our effort to make Freemius more accessible to non-English speaking audiences, we started translating key content into Spanish. However, this initiative hasn’t yet delivered the impact we were hoping for. However, we’re not giving up! We’ve identified a couple of tactics we can use to make this content more successful. As a starter, we plan to invest more in building backlinks for the ES pages.

Overall, this shift in strategy and the introduction of new initiatives have revitalized our marketing engine and positioned us for long-term growth. It’s been inspiring to see how a focused and deliberate approach can turn stagnation into momentum. Thanks to Goran and the marketing team, we’ve built a stronger foundation that will continue to serve us well in the years ahead.

Podcast: Celebrating the Success of Plugin.fm Season 2

2024 was a standout year for plugin.fm as we wrapped up Season 2 in April. The season featured world-class guests and delivered some of the most engaging and insightful conversations we’ve had to date, cementing the podcast as a go-to resource for software makers and entrepreneurs looking to scale their business.

One of the highlights was our candid conversation with Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, where we delved into fundraising and the business behind one of WordPress’s most iconic plugins. This was perhaps the most direct and transparent discussion Joost has ever had publicly about this topic, and it resonated deeply with our audience. You can watch the episode here:

The episode with Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro and Moz, tackled the evolving landscape of SEO, PR, and audience engagement, offering actionable advice and thought-provoking insights for makers looking to scale their marketing efforts. We also had the honor of hosting Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, and Jason Cohen, founder and CTO of WP Engine.

Our audience loved these episodes, and we received positive feedback that validated our efforts. For example, Jamie Marsland — the newly appointed Head of WordPress YouTube at Automattic and a Freemius maker — praised our Joost episode, commenting: “These are so good – love it 👍”.

If you haven’t had a chance to dive into Season 2, you can explore all the episodes on our YouTube channel or check out the full list on the plugin.fm podcast page.

Video: Getting Better, but Still Struggling to Get the Love We Want from YouTube

Our video efforts saw some progress this year, with educational content and customer testimonials achieving 4x more views compared to 2023. Special shout-out to Zee, Emi, Nica, and Egzon for pouring their hearts into every video project we had this year, making these achievements possible!

Here are some of our best-performing new videos that played a key role in driving these results:

This year, the team worked hard to improve every part of the production process — from topic selection and scriptwriting to editing, graphics, and workflow efficiency. The impact was clear: we produced 6 more educational videos compared to last year, delivered 5 professionally filmed customer testimonials, and hosted our first webinar.

The webinar focused on the Envato acquisition by Shutterstock and got great results (226 signups and around 100 folks attended), so we’re planning to do a lot more of them with the help of our community. Our makers are eager to improve in areas like business, marketing, pricing, and partnerships, and we believe webinars featuring top domain experts are an excellent way to level up their (and our) knowledge and practices.

If you’re an expert interested in leading a webinar, we’d love to hear from you! Please sign up using this form. Let’s work together to make 2025 a year of growth and learning for our community.

In addition to webinars, we also experimented with other new formats like YouTube Shorts and various social media videos — something we hadn’t done before. These efforts helped us expand our reach and engage with our audience in fresh, impactful ways.

While our overall views from YouTube browse features jumped from 2,559 to 4,122, we’re still working to get the YouTube algorithm working in our favor.

One of our key blockers remains a low clickthrough rate (CTR), which, despite improving by 1% this year, is still sitting at 3.8%. Increasing CTR will be a major focus in 2025, as we aim to refine our thumbnails, titles, and content hooks to better engage viewers from the get-go.

The team also saw a slight improvement in average watch time, rising from 01:14 to 01:20, indicating that viewers are staying on our videos longer — a promising sign of growing audience engagement.

We’ve made progress this year, but we know there’s still more ground to cover. Heading into 2025, the video team’s mission will be clear: unlock YouTube as a stronger traffic channel, improve CTRs, and continue delivering high-quality videos that educate, inspire, and convert.

Social Media: A Year of Experimentation and Reimagining the Wheel

This year marked an evolution in our social media approach. While we maintained our presence on traditional platforms like X and LinkedIn, we also discovered useful insights about what resonates with our community.

November was our best month in terms of performance. Thanks to two targeted campaigns, we had:

45.91% higher reach
254.05% more video views
44.80% more post engagements compared to October.

Video content and images consistently emerged as our best-performing formats across platforms. Our community particularly enjoyed getting to know the faces behind Freemius – team member spotlights and behind-the-scenes content helped humanize our brand and sparked genuine conversations.

Celebratory posts, like our 10th anniversary, created moments of shared excitement that brought our community together.

We also noticed strong engagement with product-related content, which served as valuable reminders of Freemius’s extensive capabilities. These posts often sparked engaging discussions about features that some community members hadn’t fully explored.

Throughout the year, we experimented with diversifying our content mix. From educational threads and motivational posts to community spotlights and fun industry-related content, we worked to create a more dynamic social media presence. As mentioned, our Black Friday campaign demonstrated the power of this varied approach, achieving impressive engagement across platforms.

We’ve joined Bluesky as well, recognizing it as an emerging platform where software makers gather for more authentic conversations. While it’s still in the early days, we’re excited about the platform’s potential for fostering meaningful connections within the developer community. Give us a follow if you’re interested!

2025 Roadmap: Scaling Freemius to New Heights

As we close 2024 and look toward an exciting year ahead, I want to start with a heartfelt thank you to the incredible Freemius team. 💜 Your dedication, talent, and relentless pursuit of excellence have made this year’s milestones possible. To our software makers community, you are truly the heart of Freemius. Your innovation, creativity, and trust inspire everything we do, and like families and close friends, we grow stronger by uplifting each other.

2025 will surely be a transformative year for Freemius.

We’re launching a fresh visual identity crafted by Hadas and Vitalii on design, Scott and Robert on copy, and brought to life through Milan’s brilliant engineering work. This rebrand reflects our commitment to innovation and exceptional service as we step into an exciting new chapter.
On the product side, we’re focusing on delivering more value with exciting updates including a WYSIWYG checkout editor, enhanced Affiliate Platform features like automated payouts and a network hub, and Reverse Invoices to simplify banking complexities.
We’re on track to officially launch Freemius for SaaS, bringing our offering to a broader audience with disruptive pricing strategies.
We’re also doubling down on connection and community, expanding our video content strategy, committing even stronger to our SEO approach, and planning to attend more conferences to meet makers face-to-face.

At Freemius, we share that same mindset of persistence, learning, and constant improvement. And as we push boundaries and embrace new opportunities in 2025, know that your success is our success. Together, we’re not just building businesses — we’re building a future where independent makers thrive. Here’s to a year of mutual growth, success, and shared light. Onward and upward! 🚀

Year in Review 2024: Growth, Challenges, and Bold New Beginnings