Looking back at 2023

Happy New Year! 🎉

Day one of 2024 has arrived and we couldn’t be more excited about what we have planned to release this upcoming year. 

But as 2023 comes to a close, let's take a stroll down memory lane to revisit the moments that made this year truly special for Lemon Squeezy. It's been a year filled with massive growing pains and plenty of good problems for the team to solve. It’s safe to say the juice was worth every bit of the squeeze. 

We've grown, adapted, and celebrated together but we still have so much left to do.

Our mission hasn't changed.

Lemon Squeezy helps anyone sell digital products — globally. We process payments, handle global sales tax compliance, email, affiliates, and more.

And we make it easy-peasy. We plan to continue to deliver on that promise.

So grab a comfy seat as we share our story, the ups, the downs, and everything in between that's shaped our 2023.

The great Gumroad migration

Let's kick things off where it first started in 2023. As Gumroad announced a massive pricing change, we found an opportunity to provide a new home for these digital creators. We felt like Lemon Squeezy was and still is the best alternative to Gumroad.

Last year during this time, we didn’t get the luxury of a Holiday break. The entire team worked tirelessly to onboard new merchants and we began growing 50%+ MoM. Luckily we already had things like a Gumroad migration tool to be ready for the surge.

QoL Improvements + DX investment

As we moved more into early 2023 we invested heavily in quality of life (QoL) improvements and leveled up our developer experience. We introduced a new Lemon Squeezy docs site, API docs, and developer guides.

We kicked out loads of improvements, surprise and delight enhancements, and we applied a new level of polish to the entire UI/UX.

• Team support
• Variant ID updates
• New tax categories
• Customer affiliate referral URL's
• Updated filters and export options
• Show / hide products on storefronts
• Faster checkouts (46% improvement)
• Plus, lots more.

Feel free to skim through our changelog to see all the updates across the year.

Unveiling our affiliates platform

Behind the scenes in early 2023, we were prepping for the launch of our highly anticipated affiliates feature. 

From a feature set, the Lemon Squeezy affiliates platform provides merchants with everything you would expect. Customizable commission settings, easy click tracking, cookie type and length, creative assets and banners for your affiliates to leverage.

We took it a step further and we also handle all of your affiliates onboarding, payouts, and tracking.

Last but not least, Lemon Squeezy merchants gain access to our global affiliate network. As a Lemon Squeezy merchant, you can tap into a community of affiliates to effortlessly boost your earnings with the flick of a switch. Reward your biggest fans by allowing them to earn money promoting your goods.

In less than 8 months after launching — we hit over 6,000 global affiliates and we are powering over 1,200 affiliate programs.

Turning down a Series A to keep our independence

While we were trying to keep up with the high growth we were experiencing, we explored the venture capital route.

In retrospect, it was a mix of emotions. The interest from brand name investors gave us a sense of validation and the idea of using a lot of cash to ignite even more growth was tempting.

But by now, most of you know how the story ended. After flying out to Silicon Valley in SF and capturing term sheets, we decided to hold off and maintain full control of our business.

The experience forced us to get our brand and business packaged up nicely. We also cleaned up our financials and business metrics — which was extremely beneficial.

In the end, the door is still open for us to raise more money with the right partner.

Summer Release Cycle (increasing support hires + more DX improvements)

As we rolled into the summer months of 2023, the focus remained on our developer experience. We also understood a bigger investment in our support staff was needed.

At this time, we still weren't clear on when the hyper-growth was going to slow down.

In addition to more team hires, we rolled out some exciting integrations and features.

Laravel 🤝 Lemon Squeezy

With the help of Dries Vints (Laravel Core Team) we we were finally able to release our official Laravel package. With over 5k/downloads and growing, the package is consistently being updated.

Again, thanks to Dries, we are proud to say the quality of the package is what you would expect from anything Laravel-related.

If you haven't already, head over to the repo and play around with the latest release. And don't forget to give thanks to Dries for making this all come to reality.

Framer 🤝 Lemon Squeezy

We worked with the Framer team to release a new component directly inside the Framer editor. We couldn't be bigger fans of the Framer team and the amazing product they've built.

We have been fortunate to work together in making it easy peasy to sell digital products with Framer.

Lemon Squeezy .js SDK

By mid-summer, we introduced our LemonSqueezy javascript SDK. Now it's easy-peasy to incorporate billing into your JavaScript application with the release of the official Lemon Squeezy JavaScript SDK.

Say hello to lemonsqueezy.js

Releasing Usage Based Billing (Metered Billing)

To round out the end of our 2023 summer release cycle, we dropped our usage based billing feature. This feature provides merchants the ability to custom-tailor pricing based on consumption billing.

Track product usage and bill your customers based on their consumption. Take all the complexity out of charging per-seat, per-unit or fully dynamically based on usage.

We introduced our Customer Portal

By the time we hit the Fall of 2023, we hadn't let our foot off the gas pedal when it came to new product features. Drop after drop, we could feel the platform was finally forming into what we envisioned just a few years prior.

With the release of the new customer portal, customers of our merchants had an intuitive self-service portal where they can easily manage subscriptions, payment methods, view payment history and download their invoices.

Ending the year with our Winter Release cycle

By the time we were in the final stretch of 2023, we knew things like Black Friday / Cyber Monday were about to hit. We wanted to double down on more QoL improvements and make yet another investment in our support staffing. We hired more staff in preparation.

For the first time in 2023, we felt like we were ahead of the support queue and then more growth hit us. Even with another surge, we found a way to push out more features that our customers wanted.

Shareable MMR charts

Because if you're not sharing MRR on Twitter, what are you even doing?

Analytics integration

It's worth noting, that our analytics integration with Google and Meta, is more than just a pixel. You can track page-views, events, and more. Be sure to checkout our analytics integration docs.

Next.js demo app

We introduced our very own Next.js billing app in early November.

The demo can be used as a starting point for building your own subscription-based SaaS apps. Clone the repo and build your app alongside the ready-made auth and billing. Easy-peasy.

Give the next.js billing app a test drive at the official Lemon Squeezy github repo.

Reimagined custom domains

Early on we supported custom domains but we took it a step further.

Today, custom domains will work on public-facing pages, including your storefront, hosted and overlay checkouts, our new customer portal, update payment method pages, and affiliate signup and referral URLs.

Customized Checkouts, Emails, Portals, and more

Along with Custom Domains being improved, we quickly followed up with the ability to customize the look and feel of your storefront, checkout pages, emails, customer portals, and more.

Ready to start customizing your store? Take the new customization options for a spin. Go to the design editor →

Make Lemonade Podcast (Season 3)

After a brief pause on the podcast (while we were fundraising) we fired the podcast back up. With the help of James McKinven (my co-host), we got back to our weekly episode releases.

We have a lot more coming in 2024 but for now, catch up on the latest episodes.

Wedges (our last gift of 2023)

Before ringing the New Year, the team wanted to give one last gift to the Lemon Squeezy community. We released Wedges. An entire open-source design system + react UI library.

We plan to release new Wedges every month to keep the collection growing.

Be sure to check out Wedges (it's completely free!)

• Wedges for React
• Wedges for Figma
• Wedges Docs
• Wedges Components

What to expect in 2024

Of course, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. With the insane growth — we dealt with our fair share of pains. We are still feeling the support burden and we are still actively hiring more and more support team members.

Internally, the team is ready to take on the new year, new challenges, and push ourselves to grow in new ways. We know that what got us to where were are, is not will take us to where we want to go.

As we look ahead to 2024, we're excited about some major releases including:

• Cart
• Upsells
• Bundles
• Marketplace
• PayPal Subscriptions
• WordPress experience
• Courses & Memberships
• Discord, Telegram, Circle integration
• V2 Email marketing feature improvements

In short, you can expect more of the same from the Lemon Squeezy team. Keeping it fresh, zesty, and kicking out more of those same old juicy Lemon drops.

Stay fresh 🍋