v1.5.3

Paid plans start with a free week instead of a free month, and you can turn it down

Standard, Pro and Custom used to be free for a month whenever the customer was new to Flux Cloud and picked a one-month period, whether they wanted it or not. The only way to pay from day one was to buy three months or more.

The offer is now a free 7-day trial, and it is a choice: take it, or skip it and pay immediately at whatever billing period you picked. The trial takes no card, registers the app for exactly seven days, and ends by expiring unless you keep it.

The Free plan is untouched

It is not a trial and never was. It stays free for as long as it is your only Orbit app, registers a normal month, and is renewed month after month for good.

The Free plan stops being charged to people who already use Flux

Two parts of the wizard disagreed about what makes an app free. The plan step already applied the real rule, that the free tier is free while it is your only Orbit app, and offered the $0.99 additional-app plan to anyone who had one. The payment step asked a different question, whether this was your first app on Flux at all, so a customer with any other Flux app was sent to pay for a plan sold as free forever. There is now one answer to that question.

A private Orbit app was also invisible to the service that decides this, because an enterprise app's contents are encrypted, so a second free plan could be handed out to someone the dashboard had already charged for it. Both sides now read the same thing.

Paid updates ask for payment again

Changing an app's resources shows the payment step again. A regression had made that screen skip straight to the deployment tracker, on a screen whose own subtitle asks you to complete payment.

Build note

v1.5.2 carries the same changes but failed to build: the runtime image names every file it takes from src/ one by one, and the new src/config/offer.js was not on that list. Nothing was published under that tag.