Changelog

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.

New geolocation-based payments distribution chart & Audience Analytics charts UX improvements

Geo Payments chart (Sales Analytics dashboard)

We are super happy to announce the immediate availability of a geolocation-based payments distribution chart. This chart shows the total distribution of payments by geolocation or country.

The chart helps determine the country of your major target audience.

The chart also shows the gross volume of payments that occurred per day distributed over countries by default. It can also show the payment count (instead of gross).

You can also customize the chart to show the total gross volume of payments that occurred from the beginning to the selected day, plotted over a stacked area chart or a simple area chart, along with a tabular view to see the total volume of payment gross and payment count until the end date.

Enhancements to the existing Audience Analytics charts

Following the development of the Geo Payments chart, we piggybacked the features to the existing charts in the Audience Analytics page.

As you can see, the charts can now be plotted as ‘Area’ or ‘Diff’, along with the already existing ‘Stacked Area’ visualization.

Data export permission-related improvements

We’ve improved the data export-related permissions in the Developer Dashboard. Only a Product Owner or an Admin can export data from the ‘Users’ page.

Freemius User Export

The rest of the roles can either have view-only permissions (for example Developer or Support) or be completely blocked from viewing Users (for example Accountant).

The ‘Download’ button will now be hidden for roles with view-only permission. The API will also block a request to the .csv endpoint.

Checkout improvements — better mobile UX

Mobile UX improvements

We noticed that our checkout’s footer was being cut off on some mobile devices.

In this iteration, we fixed this regression. Additionally, we also improved the native scrolling experience on mobile browsers. The mobile menu bar will now automatically be hidden when scrolling down, giving more real estate to the Checkout app.

Fixed a typo

We’d been using the term “Annually” in the billing cycle UI for a long time. While this was not technically incorrect, the term ‘Annual’ fits better (kudos to our Support Lead, Leo, and Digital Copywriter, Robert).

In this update, we changed the term.

Improvements to developer transactional emails

We’ve added a small enhancement to include the customer’s ‘Store Profile’ link in the transactional emails we send to developers.

Freemius transactional emails with "Store Profile" link.

This helps developers quickly view the customer’s profile in the context of the product’s store. Transactional emails are sent for new purchases, renewals, etc.

SaaS-related improvements

We’ve pushed a few more improvements to make our system more SaaS-friendly.

Using the title ‘One Time’ instead of ‘Lifetime’ in the billing cycle

In the context of SaaS, ‘Lifetime’ often doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Billing Cycle UI showing "One Time" instead of "Lifetime"

To improve the checkout experience, we’ve changed the title to ‘One Time’ instead.

Bug fix in the multi-license discount UI

We noticed a small edge-case regression where the checkout line item and subtotal were not matching in cases of SaaS products. We’ve pushed a fix.

Enabled the new Checkout style by default

Today, we’re rolling out the new Checkout for everyone.

New checkout style

The new style will show up regardless of whether you have a custom CSS setting for the legacy checkout or not.

If you want to customize the new Checkout with CSS, please see our official guide here.

Freemius Developer Dashboard - Checkout CSS setting

Make sure to save the URL in the ‘Custom Checkout CSS file’ under the Developer Dashboard and not the one marked as (Legacy).

If for some reason you’d still like to use the legacy Checkout, we are offering it for a limited time. You must pass the checkout_style: 'legacy' in the JS snippet configuration.

    const handler = FS.Checkout.configure({
        plugin_id:  '9987',
        plan_id:    '16744',
        public_key: 'pk_f6ac0907ee421b1db0c94833cf26b',
        image:      'https://your-plugin-site.com/logo-100x100.png'
    });
    
    $('#purchase').on('click', function (e) {
        handler.open({
            // Force load the legacy checkout
            checkout_style: 'legacy',
            name     : 'My Awesome SaaS',
            // ...
        });
        e.preventDefault();
    });

We urge you to stop using the legacy Checkout and migrate to the new one as soon as possible.

SaaS-related improvements to the Checkout

In a bid to make our system more friendly to SaaS businesses, we’ve implemented the following improvements to our Checkout.

Modified license unit label

Following up on a request from our partner, we’ve introduced month as a license unit label (for example 5 Months API access).

Freemius SaaS license unit improvements

Notably, we’ve also removed the word License from the dropdown as it makes little to no sense for SaaS checkouts. You’ll also notice that the input field asking for an existing license key to ‘upgrade’ the license is also hidden for SaaS.

If you’d like to customize the license unit of your SaaS, please get in touch with us.

Customizing the post-purchase message

Because SaaS requires different post-purchase instructions, we’ve added the capability in our system to modify the message shown after making a payment.

Freemius SaaS post message improvements

This feature is still in beta. If you’d like to change your post-purchase message, please get in touch with us.

Improvements to the Invoice

Freemius SaaS invoice

We’ve stopped adding the word Lifetime before the plan name in the ‘Item Description’ for SaaS products and lifetime billing cycles. Usually, one-time payments for a SaaS business means purchasing a specific amount of resources. Therefore, the word Lifetime could be confusing.

New analytics metrics: Total Installs

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new metric in your Developer Dashboard.

Total Installs (Audience Analytics)

Previously, we relied on the ‘Activations’ and ‘Deactivations’ events to determine or project the number of active installations or sites a plugin might have. We realized this metric was error-prone because of how the SDK can be used.

Total, active and abandoned installs

We’ve introduced a much better metric to more accurately determine total Active and Abandoned Installs.

Improved lifetime installs cards and statistics

The same metric is now used to accurately determine the ‘Opted In Active Installs’ and ‘All-time Installs’ in the lifetime data section.

Improved GDPR cookie tracking in embedded pricing page

We noticed that when the pricing page is loaded through our WordPress SDK, the cookie consent UI is always being shown, regardless of whether the user has already consented or rejected it.

The issue was rooted in how modern browsers are now treating iFrames and third-party cookies. We have fixed this issue. Additionally, to make it future-proof and more secure, we have implemented the partitioned cookie policy.