Pro installs alongside the free plugin rather than replacing it — the two are separate plugin files, both active at once, and the free plugin remains the thing that actually runs your programme.
Installing it#
- Download the Pro ZIP from your purchase email.
- Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, then activate.
- Enter your licence key when prompted.
Two conditions, not one#
Whether an install counts as “Pro” — whether Pro features actually show up — depends on two things being true at the same time: the Pro plugin files being active, and a valid licence being attached to the site. Each is checked separately rather than assumed from the other, because the two ways they can disagree matter differently:
- A valid licence, but the Pro plugin not installed. The free plugin can detect this on its own — a licence check doesn’t need the Pro files to be present — and it’s treated as an install prompt, not as Pro secretly working. Nothing about the customer’s paid features turns on just because the licence server says yes; the code that would run those features simply isn’t loaded yet.
- The Pro plugin installed, but no valid licence (or a lapsed one). The Pro-specific behaviour doesn’t activate. This side fails in whichever direction keeps a paid build testable in development — before a Freemius product even exists for it — without that leniency ever reaching a live pricing page’s claim about what the customer owns; the two checks are deliberately asymmetric for exactly that reason.
What changes immediately#
The Pro features appear in the screens they belong to rather than in a separate area: extra payout rails in the payout batch, scoring on the referral list, matrix topology options in the commission rules, chosen (rather than auto-generated) short-link slugs. Individual features are switched on through their own named filters — a rail arriving through the payout-gateway filter, a fraud verdict through the risk-verdict filter — rather than through one central “is this Pro” flag threaded through every feature. That’s a deliberate split: a feature gate answers “should this particular thing render,” and it can move between tiers without touching anything else, while the coarse Pro/not-Pro question above exists only for the one place that genuinely needs it — telling a customer on a pricing screen what they already own. Nothing you configured is migrated or reset when Pro activates, because nothing moved: the free plugin’s tables, settings and rows are exactly what Pro’s own screens then read and write into.
What does not change#
Your existing affiliates, referrals, balances and payout history are untouched. Attribution keeps working exactly as before — Pro adds to the free tracking (branded slugs, server-to-server postbacks, referring-domain automation) rather than substituting its own tracking mechanism for the one already running.
If the licence lapses#
The Pro features stop, and the programme carries on. Referrals still track, commissions still calculate, and the free payout rails still settle — you lose the Pro rails and the Pro extras, not the ability to pay people. Balances owed remain owed and remain visible. A lapsed licence should cost you features, not records: a fraud-scored referral held for review under Pro simply goes back to being neutrally scored the way it always would be under the free plugin, not lost or corrupted.