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Prorating Upgrades & Downgrades
By default, Freemius prorates plan updates (upgrades or downgrades). Unlike the commonly used prorating implementations which preserve the renewal payment processing time, Freemius’ proration works slightly different and will restart the billing date based on the time of the plan update. This methodology simplifies understanding the discount for the customers and also benefits the sellers … Continued

Why is the active installs metric on WordPress.org different than the one on Freemius?

There’s a fundamental difference in the way WordPress.org and Freemius count active installs.

Based on publicly available responses from key people in the WordPress meta team, the WordPress.org active installs counter relies on the WordPress.org updates mechanism, which is sampled on a weekly basis. Updates are triggered only when there’s traffic to the site, so if a site installed your plugin or theme and did not get any traffic during that sampling period OR, if the updates mechanism is blocked (or turned off), this site will not get counted. Also, we suspect that the WordPress.org sampling relies on domains and not on IPs. In that case, for example, all of the VVV installs that installed your product will only be counted as a single site.

On the other hand, Freemius uses real actions such as an explicit opt-in or deactivation/uninstall events.
One fallback of that tracking methodology is if a user hard-deletes the product from the filesystem, using FTP/SSH, it is still considered active.

Freemius Overlay Checkout JavaScript API
Selling with Freemius from any website takes just a few minutes to configure. Once you have your product’s plans and pricing set up within the Freemius Dashboard, simply go to the Plans section and click the Get Checkout Code button. You’ll get a ready-to-use simple JavaScript snippet that you can embed on any website. Here’s … Continued

Software Updates and Distribution
The WordPress SDK includes a complete software updates mechanism out-of-the-box, and is integrated with the Software Licensing engine, and the rest of Freemius suite of products. The auto updates mechanism is seamlessly integrated with the WP Core updates mechanism, but can only work when the product, plugin or theme, is actually active (otherwise, the custom … Continued

The License Renewals Mechanism
All Freemius subscriptions are automatically renewed. When a renewal payment is successfully processed, the associated license will automatically be extended, based on the billing cycle. In case there’s a delay with the renewal payment processing the license will be set to Expired mode until the renewal is processed. When there’s an issue processing the renewal … Continued

How can I get paid? How do I get my earnings?

There are currently four payment methods available for you to collect your earnings from Freemius:

  1. PayPal (Default payment, using PayPal MassPay)
  2. Payoneer
  3. Wire Transfer (International and Domestic / IBAN)
  4. TransferWise

International wires can be converted to your local currency. Due to our high volumes we’ve managed to negotiate great terms with our bank for currency conversion-rates and a complete fee waiver on foreign-currency international wire.

What will my customers see on their Credit-Card and PayPal statement?

People who purchase your WordPress product via Freemius get a CC statement after purchase. That statement will show your plugin’s name.
For PayPal, the store name will be your product’s name but PayPal emails will state Freemius and will include the plugin description in the plan. Unfortunately, PayPal doesn’t provide a way to tweak this further.

Text & Strings Customization
All the SDK’s text and strings are customizable. Every string has its own unique key which you can use to override it. You can use the fs_override_i18n() function as following: Or the override_i18n() public method of the Freemius class:

WordPress SDK
The opt-in screen customization, how to handle licensing, localization, testing, and debugging

I received a subscription notification without a payment notification, what’s going on?

Due to the way PayPal’s recurring profiles mechanism works, it can take up to 24 hours until Freemius receives the approval notification for the subscriptions’ initial payment. To keep a smooth purchase experience for customers, Freemius will email the license key and the download link to the paid product – right away.

To mitigate potential abuse, when a customer subscribes to your product the system will issue a 24-hour blocking license. Once we receive the payment notification from PayPal, the license will be extended based on the subscription billing cycle, and the blocking state of the license will be auto-adjusted based on the plan’s configuration.

We could have designed the upgrade process slightly differently, emailing the downloadable product only after the payment approval, but we decided that we aren’t going to “break” a proper subscription UX just because of a small group of trolls that can abuse this PayPal flaw.