Pro overview, licensing and expiry
What Pro adds, how the licence works, and exactly what happens to your data if it lapses.
Price Anchor Pro is a separate plugin that extends the free one. It is not a replacement and not a bundle: the free plugin must stay installed and active.
Why two plugins instead of one with a licence gate
- WordPress.org does not want locked code or upsell scaffolding inside a hosted plugin.
- The free plugin must not ship code it can never run.
- The free plugin’s security releases must not wait on Pro’s release cycle.
Pro consumes only the free plugin’s documented hook contract. It adds no second writer for prices, rates or settings.
What Pro adds
| Area | Capability |
|---|---|
| Currencies | Unlimited additional source currencies, chosen per product and per variation |
| Rates | Keyed commercial provider, automatic failover, rate history and chart |
| Risk | Rate Guard approval workflow, minimum margin floor, product and category price freezes |
| Pricing rules | Markup per product or category, extra charm and increment rounding modes |
| Cost | Locked foreign acquisition cost with variation inheritance, order-line cost stamping, optional native COGS synchronisation |
| Reporting | Refund-adjusted gross product profit by pricing and cost currency |
| Records | Tamper-evident audit log of who changed what and which rate applied |
| Operations | Bulk source-currency assignment, bounded CSV import and export, WP-CLI commands, throttled email alerts |
Pro adds five tabs to the Price Anchor screen: Approval, Records, Sales, Bulk tools and Advanced. Each is capability-gated.
Licensing
Pro is a premium-only product licensed through Freemius, with annual licences for 1, 5 or 20 production sites. Every tier includes every capability; only the site allowance differs. Updates arrive through the normal WordPress admin update flow.
The free plugin contains no Freemius SDK and no telemetry of any kind.
If a licence expires
Expiry is a feature gate, never a deletion event:
- the Pro composition root does not boot, so the Approval, Records, Sales, Bulk tools and Advanced screens are not registered and cannot be used through normal WordPress paths;
- WooCommerce keeps selling at the last stored prices — nothing is unpriced and nothing goes to zero;
- new products can use the free plugin’s primary source or native pricing;
- products already anchored to a Pro-only source keep their source metadata and their last stored price, and are simply not repriced;
- Pro settings, acquisition costs, rate history, audit rows and historic order evidence all remain stored;
- renewing restores the saved configuration without re-entering anything.
Expiry never invokes uninstall cleanup. Even an explicit WordPress uninstall of Pro intentionally preserves product acquisition-cost metadata and WooCommerce selling prices, because financial evidence must not disappear with a plugin.
An honest note on what a local licence check is
This is a local PHP entitlement gate, not unbreakable DRM. An administrator who controls the server can modify PHP and bypass any local check. Licensing prevents ordinary unlicensed use, manages activations and delivers updates; it does not make customer-controlled code impossible to patch, and no plugin’s licensing does.