Changelog

We understand that most MoR or payment providers stop their integration guide at “now you can charge your customers.” That leaves you, the maker, to figure out all the glue code for:

1. Checkout
2. Purchase processing
3. Validation and storage of purchases
4. Entitlement logic
5. Syncing licenses or entitlements with outside changes
6. Creating Customer Portals for self-management of billing and purchases

At Freemius, we care about your time. That’s why we set out to create not just another “Billing SDK,” but a solution that provides patterns and components to solve these problems end-to-end.

With that in mind, today we’re shipping a major unlock: our JavaScript SDK and React Starter Kit.

By using our SDKs and Starter Kits, you’ll get all of this integration for free, so you can focus on what truly matters—the business logic of your product. As we like to say: “Your product shouldn’t be blocked by subscription plumbing. Now it isn’t.”

Please check our official documentation for the full details. Below are some highlights.

Backend JS/TS SDK

• Fully typed API client (licenses, subscriptions, users, payments, pricing).
• Checkout builder: generate overlay options & hosted links (with sandbox & redirect verification).
• Purchase + entitlement helpers (retrievePurchaseData, entitlement.getActive, upgrade authorization).
• Strongly typed webhook listener + request processors (Fetch runtimes, Node HTTP, serverless, edge).
• Signature verification & secure redirect handling (no copy-pasting HMAC code).
• Runtime flexible: Node.js, Bun, Deno.

React Starter Kit

• Pre-built UI: Pricing Table, Overlay Checkout trigger, Feature Gating helpers (Paywalls), and a fully working Customer Portal.
• Seamless server → client handoff: serialized checkout + purchase data patterns.

Our system works with all modern JavaScript frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt, Hono, and more.

If you’re just starting out, we highly recommend using our SDK as your foundation. If you already have a working integration, try it out in a side branch and replace your existing “duct-tape” billing glue. Tell us what shaved the most time off your build—and what’s still rough.

This week we are releasing a set of UI/UX enhancements to our Developer Dashboard. These updates are tailored for SaaS makers but also bring benefits to our WordPress makers community, making configuration and integration smoother across the board.

Smarter Pricing UI

We refined the pricing input UI to be smarter, clearer, and adaptive to how you’re configuring your product.

For example, if you are configuring only a single pricing inside a plan, the UI will simply ask you to configure the billing cycles for that pricing.

However, if you are configuring multiple bulk units (like selling credits), the UI will adjust accordingly, as shown in the screenshot below.

Support for Custom Bulk Pricing

Previously, our system was limited to a preset list of unit options for creating bulk pricing.

Now we’ve introduced a new option called Custom Unit... (where the term Unit represents your selling unit and is dynamic based on your configuration), which lets you define the exact number of units you want for bulk pricing. Simply click on the button and you will be presented a new dialog from where you can configure the pricing.

This is especially useful for SaaS products selling consumable units such as credits or tokens.

Plan Description is Back for the React Starter Kit

With the release of the React Starter Kit, the Plan Description section is now back under plans.

If you configure the description, it will show up in the Pricing Data API endpoint as well as be rendered by the React Starter Kit.

Improved API & Keys Page

With the release of our JS SDK, we’ve also improved the API & Keys page under Settings.

Now, all the keys you need to communicate with Freemius are consolidated into a single page.

We’ve also added improved usage examples with ready-to-use, copy-pastable snippets for getting started quickly with our SDKs.

This week, along with the release of our new JS SDK, we are rolling out several important updates to our API Documentation, OpenAPI Schema, and webhook events.

1. The pricing endpoint now includes details about the selling unit. This makes it easier to render accurate information inside custom pricing tables.
2. The subscription cancellation endpoint now properly supports an array of cancellation reasons. This allows you to capture multiple reasons from customers, and Freemius will notify you via email.
3. The subscriptions endpoint has a new enrich_with_cancellation_discounts flag. When used, subscriptions will include a has_subscription_cancellation_discount property, helping you determine if a cancellation discount has already been applied. You can use this to show a custom UI during the cancellation flow (see our React Starter Kit for examples).
4. The license.extended webhook now includes a data.is_renewal property, indicating whether the license extension happened due to a subscription renewal. You can hook to this event to provide some entitlement per billing cycle.

We noticed a regression in our Checkout where the system was incorrectly sending cart recovery emails when customers were simply updating their payment method.

The root cause has been identified and a fix has been deployed to ensure cart recovery emails are only triggered in the correct purchase scenarios.

When a user buys a Freemius powered product for the first time, we create an account for them with a temporary password so they can manage their purchases through our self-service Customer Portal.

To simplify the login process, we also send this temporary password via email. Once they log in, they are required to change it.

Previously, the label was shown as “Password,” which caused some confusion among customers and security researchers who thought it indicated a potential leak.

To avoid misunderstandings, the label has now been updated to “Temporary password,” making its purpose clear.

We noticed a bug in our License table where, in some cases, duplicate rows were being rendered. This happened when a license had multiple canceled or inactive subscriptions from the past. With Freemius, it’s possible for a license to go through multiple subscriptions during its lifecycle—for example, when customers upgrade plans or change payment methods.

However, showing duplicate licenses created confusion for makers. We’ve rolled out a fix: the table will now display each license only once and correctly associate it with the latest subscription.

Did you see it already? Our freshly designed and fully revamped documentation website is now live! After about a month in the making, we’re super excited to finally share it with our community.

We’ve made several improvements by tearing down the old site and rebuilding it from scratch with modern technology. The new site is also fully redesigned to align with our updated branding.

We’ll soon publish a blog post diving into the tech behind the build, but for now, here’s what you can start using right away:

Smarter & Real-Time Search

Search now feels instant—results load immediately and are much more accurate compared to the old system.

Restructured Categories

We re-triaged our documentation and restructured categories and guides to make content easier to discover and more relevant to what you’re looking for.

Please explore and let us know if you have suggestions for further improvements.

Ask AI

Every page now has quick-access options to:

1. Copy or view as Markdown
2. Open in ChatGPT or Claude

This lets you instantly use LLMs to ask specific questions about our documentation.

Improved Code Snippets

We’ve switched to an industry-standard renderer. From syntax highlighting to a one-click copy button, everything is optimized for a better Developer Experience (DX).

Dark Mode

Just like our Developer Dashboard, the documentation site now supports dark mode.

Click the toggle button in the bottom-left corner to switch between modes and enjoy the docs in your preferred style.

This week we are introducing a new feature, especially tailored for SaaS makers. When using the Overlay Mode of our Checkout, you’d often want to hook into the success callback to handle post-processing. In this UX flow, it often makes less sense to display the final success dialog from Checkout.

To address this, we’ve added an option to skip it. Simply head to Plans → Customization and enable the “Skip confirmation dialog after purchase” setting.

Once enabled, the dialog will be disabled by default for all overlay checkouts. Here’s a conceptual demo video showing how an application can hook into the success callback to show confettis and toast.

However, you can still use the show_confirmation_dialog parameter to control it on a case-by-case basis. For more details, please read our documentation here.

This week we are rolling out several Quality of Life improvements to our Developer Dashboard.

Charts and Controls are better on all screen sizes

We improved the responsiveness of charts and their controls to display better across different screen sizes.

They now adapt more intelligently to the available space, ensuring a smoother experience whether on desktop or smaller screens.

Previous and Next Button on all Sidebar Panes

During the rebranding we introduced next and previous buttons for some sidebar panes that accompany tables. These provide a great UX by letting you quickly navigate through different items without going back to the table view.

This week we’ve consolidated the feature by bringing the same navigation to all sidebar panes, making item browsing more consistent across the Dashboard.

Fixed Notification UI for New Developers

Freemius allows you to customize the notifications you receive as a seller. We noticed a regression where, for some new makers, accessing the customization page caused it to break in certain cases.

This edge case has now been fixed, ensuring a smooth notification setup experience for all makers.

Freemius Developer Dashboard allows you to easily create licenses for your potential customers manually. This helps in providing short-time access to potential buyers without requiring them to go through the entire Checkout or Trial process.

You can navigate to the Licenses page and then click the Create License button to get started.

However, we noticed a regression where even after entering an email address, the license was not being assigned to the customer. We have identified and fixed this issue.

Freemius supports redirecting the Hosted Checkout after a successful purchase. This enables immediate post-purchase handling for SaaS and apps when you prefer not to wait for webhooks and want to process data right away.

We discovered that redirects were not triggering for Free Trials. We’ve fixed the issue to ensure trials behave consistently with paid purchases.

Alongside the fix, the redirect now includes additional query parameters so you can branch your logic without extra API calls:

• action – One of purchase, license_update, payment_method_update, or trial, indicating the type of action performed.
• trial – For trials, either free or paid, describing the trial type.
• trial_ends_at – For trials, a YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS timestamp indicating when the trial ends.

We noticed a regression from our rebranding where some tables in our Developer Dashboard were not aligned properly. The difference was most visible in the actions column.

This has now been resolved.

Freemius has a powerful affiliate platform where we track sales made by affiliates and send updates to both the seller and the affiliate. These emails also hint at the tentative time when the affiliate payment will be cleared.

In general, we include a cooling-off period of 60 days to ensure that any payments associated with affiliates can be validated against potential refunds or disputes. This makes the platform more trustworthy for both sellers and affiliates.

However, we noticed that the previous copy was not fully clear and caused some confusion. It mentioned that the payout date was due to a “30-day refund policy of the product.” While that used to be correct long ago, makers now have the flexibility to customize refund policies. Regardless, the cooling-off period is there to properly process refunds and disputes.

To make this crystal clear, the email copy has now been updated to:
“We include a short cooling-off period so any refunds or disputes can be handled first.”

In the beginning of every month (payout cycle) Freemius sends automatic emails to our makers explaining the upcoming payout along with a copy of a pro-forma invoice.

This week we are rolling out a small but important update to the pro-forma invoice. We identified two issues: in some places the date/time was not properly formatted, and a negative - sign was incorrectly added to zero values.

Both issues have now been fixed, ensuring your invoices are cleaner and more accurate.

Our SDK Integration page from the Developer Dashboard allows you to configure various settings to tailor the Opt-In experience as per the behavior of your plugin.

One such option is to enter a redirection path that triggers after the plugin activation. When enabled, the SDK ensures the user is redirected to the specified URL after the Opt-In is completed.

However, we noticed a bug where makers could mistakenly enter the redirection URL in absolute form instead of relative form. This often happened when the full URL was copy-pasted directly from the browser without stripping the unnecessary parts. As a result, the SDK integration and Opt-In flow could break.

To fix this, we’ve now updated our UI to strictly accept only relative URLs for Opt-In redirection. This ensures consistency and prevents accidental misconfigurations.