fr3n 0.9.18: Public Beta is Live

by Oskar Freye

fr3n hits public beta — with pricing pages, automated email reminders, Stripe Standard accounts, and EU tax compliance.

fr3n Public Beta Launch

Happy Halloween. The scariest thing I’ve done this month? Bumped fr3n to 0.9.18-public-beta and opened the doors.

The Road to Beta

September and October were all about closing the gaps between “it works on my machine” and “actual people can use this”:

Payments that actually work: One-time payments now work for every content type. The shop flow handles automatic tax calculation — we enabled oss_union for EU countries, which means VAT is calculated based on the buyer’s location. Stripe handles the compliance, we handle the routing.

Stripe Standard over Express: I switched from Stripe Express to Standard account onboarding. Express was fine for prototyping but Standard gives creators more control over their payout experience and looks more professional. The migration was cleaner than expected.

Automated email reminders: A scheduling system that sends reminder emails at configurable intervals. The templates are internationalized — we built an i18n layer for all email content so creators can reach fans in their language. The HTML email renderer got another round of improvements for cross-client compatibility. (Outlook, I’m looking at you.)

Pricing page: Built an internationalized pricing page with SSR rendering on the landing site. The whole button is a link now, because apparently people click the text but not the button border. UX is humbling.

Fan CRM and Products

The FanCRM now fetches all users and gives creators a real dashboard view of their community. The ProductsManager component handles digital goods with proper CRUD. Content types expanded to include raffles — because creators love giveaways and fans love winning things.

What Beta Means

Public beta means: real creators, real fans, real money flowing through the system. The infrastructure is SST v3.17 on AWS, the database is battle-tested with ElectroDB, and the RBAC system handles the multi-tenant complexity.

It’s not perfect. There are bugs I know about and bugs I don’t. But it’s real, it’s live, and people are using it.

Next: a breather. Maybe. Probably not.