Outseta End of Summer 2021 Product Update

Back in early June we announced the biggest round of product updates we've ever made—here at the end of the summer we're back with another update that we think ain't too shabby. While our development pace slowed a bit as we all poked heads outside and took some time off, here's the new stuff that we launched while you were splashing around at the beach.

New Feature! End-to-end per user pricing

We are enormously excited about this one—while we've always been able to handle the payment side of per-user-pricing, we needed to close the loop between our authentication and payment tools. For example, if a customer bought a five user plan and went to add a sixth user, we weren't automatically prompting the customer to pay for the additional user. Now Outseta allows customers to add or remove users, handles pro-ration for payments appropriately based on the change in the number of users, and won't allow customers to add additional users until they pay for them.

This may not sound earth shattering, but as both an authentication and payments tool this is a workflow that not many companies are able to support out-of-the-box. For example, Stripe also supports the payments side of per user pricing—but without their own authentication tools, developers still need to spend a significant chunk of time integrating Stripe with their own authentication solution.

Again, time spent away from building your core product—and incremental value that we're providing to our customers out-of-the-box.

In order to setup per user pricing, make sure you're using Outseta in "Team" mode on the AUTH > SIGN UP AND LOGIN page. You can then create per user pricing plans by going to BILLING > PLANS.

You can add or remove users from any customer's plan directly from their Account record, or your customers can add or remove users themselves via Outseta's profile embed.

New Feature! Payment Links

File this one away as a marketing failure on my behalf... the hard truth is Outseta has offered payment links for over two years now. We never heard much about them from our customer base, we didn't surface them well in the product, and I certainly did very little to promote them. Then Stripe launched payment links earlier this summer, and the whole world went bananas.

Like, Gwen Stefani B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Especially the no-code community. Lesson learned.

Well, we've now rectified that so you can easily build payments links for any plan or group of plans by using our configuration tool on the AUTH > EMBEDS > SIGN-UP page.

If you haven't used payment links before, it's the ability to generate a unique link to a branded, hosted page where users can sign up for any of the membership plans that you offer. Here's an example—you can use this to actually sign up for our Founder's Plan if you wish!

Outseta Founder's Plan Payment Link

New Feature! Redesigned, downloadable invoices

This had long been one of the most requested features by our customers, particularly in Europe. The invoices that Outseta generated previously couldn't be edited, were not particularly attractive, and couldn't be downloaded as a PDF. Our European customers in particular often needed the ability to download their invoices and make sure that the invoices created for each of their customers required specific information for compliance purposes in the European Union. So here's what we did about it.

First, the invoices are just more attractive and can be downloaded as a PDF directly on the BILLING > INVOICES page.

Second, invoices can now be directly accessed and downloaded by customers via Outseta's profile embed.

Finally, we added a standard property on all Account records called "Invoice Notes." Any information that you include in this field will be included on the invoices for that customer going forward, giving you complete control over the information that appears on your invoices at a customer by customer level.

New Feature! SSO Integration with Tribe.so

We're psyched to announce that Outseta now offers a single sign-on (SSO) integration with Tribe.so, one of the leading platforms for building an online community. I was super impressed with Tribe's user interface as I began playing with their software, and a lot of SaaS companies—like ConvertKit—use it to build online communities around their products.

Single sign-on aside, Outseta allows you to monetize your Tribe community with membership payments, maintain CRM records for each of your members, and easily communicate with with community members using our email tools and segments. Shout out to the Tribe team for making this happen—take a look at their product reviews.

If you're interested in using Outseta to manage your Tribe community, start here.

New Feature! Passwordless Authentication via Magic.Link or Cotter.App

Outseta's standard means of authenticating users requires that new customers receive a confirmation email that prompts them to set a password and login. This serves two purposes:

• It validates the users' email address.
• Setting a password provides an extra layer of security.

Security aside, this can save a bunch of headaches in instances where users might fat-finger their email address. And as Outseta is also an email tool, it ensures you have a valid means of communicating with your new members.

While that's the case and the workflow we recommend in most instances, we recognize that their are instances where passwordless authentication makes sense. In these scenarios, users receive a confirmation email every time they want to login—they simply need to click a link within an email to login, without setting a password.

Outseta now supports passwordless authentication via either Magic.Link or Cotter.App. You can learn more about setting up these tools to use with your Outseta account here.

New Feature! Protected Content based on add-on products or subscriptions

We've bolstered our protected content features so that you can now protect content based on add-on products or subscriptions. This is another feature that might fly under the radar but is really important for membership sites—users can now have multiple subscriptions and setup protected content based on both! Content can be protected at the page/folder level, or you can show/hide any element on a page based on whether a members has purchased add-on products as well.

To show or hide individual elements on a page based on whether a members has purchased an add-on product or subscription, use the data-o-addon-content attribute as outlined here.

Two other minor but important updates...

Plans with a free trial can choose whether or not to require payment information at the plan level

Outseta has always supported free trials and given you the ability to choose whether you want to require payment information in order to sign up for a free trial. The product's default behavior is to not require payment information—users instead get prompted for payment if they try to login after their free trial period has ended. Alternatively, you can choose to require payment information in order to start a trial—users then get automatically charged at the end of their trial period.

None of this has changed, but this used to be a global setting that would be applied to all of your plans. You can now choose whether or not to require payment information on a plan-by-plan basis.

Transactional email templates now allow you to edit their subject lines

Outseta gives you access to all of the transactional emails that we send on your behalf by going to SETTINGS > TEMPLATES > EMAILS. These emails are used for lost password workflows and notifying customers if there's a problem processing their invoices—stuff like that.

While we've always allowed you to edit these emails, you previously weren't able to edit the subject line of each email—that was a big problem for customers who needed to translate the emails. Fixed it!

What's next...

As we round the home stretch of 2021, we're working on all kinds of new stuff but we're always getting asked about what comes next. There are two major themes of work we're actively focused on:

• Improving our email marketing tools—specifically, adding a drag-and-drop email builder and making some performance improvements.
• Reporting—We'll be adding a new navigation item focused on reporting and a series of more detailed reports.

Per usual, there's an awful lot here and we hope you see the value you're getting for your subscription fees increase with each update. If you have any questions at all, please reach out at support(at)outseta.com. Cheers!

-The Outseta Team