Clerk Changelog

You can now transition active subscriptions between different billing plans right from the dashboard or backend API. Switch a customer's subscription from one price to another while keeping their billing smooth — whether you're upgrading them from free to paid or moving between paid tiers.

What's new

This subscription item management feature lets you easily change a customer's active subscription item to a new pricing plan. It makes essential Billing workflows simple:

• Promotional offers - Apply special pricing to existing subscribers
• Tiered upgrades and downgrades - Move customers between different paid plans based on their needs or usage
• Plan migrations - Transition customers to new pricing structures as your product evolves

When you create a price transition, we handle all the timing and billing logic for you:

Free-to-paid transitions depend on the customer's current subscription state:

• New to paid: When transitioning a customer from free to a paid plan with no other active subscription, the paid plan activates immediately and the customer is charged right away

  • Example: Moving a customer on the free plan to Pro ($50/month). Pro activates immediately, customer charged $50.

• Free to paid with active subscription: When transitioning from free to paid but the customer has another active subscription, the paid plan is scheduled as upcoming to avoid billing conflicts

  • Example: Customer on free plan with an active Pro subscription through March 20. Switching the free plan to Enterprise sets Enterprise as upcoming until March 20.

Paid-to-paid transitions schedule the new plan to avoid billing overlap:

• Switching between paid plans: When a customer already has an active paid subscription, the new plan is scheduled to start when their current billing period ends
  • Example: Upgrading a customer from Basic ($20/month, paid through Feb 15) to Enterprise ($35/month) on Jan 15
  • Basic remains active through Feb 15 (already paid for)
  • Enterprise becomes upcoming and activates Feb 15 (customer charged then)
  • Prevents double-billing the customer for overlapping periods

Paid-to-free transitions schedule the free plan as upcoming, allowing the customer's current paid subscription to run through its paid period before automatically activating the free plan.

Getting started

To change the price or plan of your subscriptions:

1. Navigate to Subscriptions⁠ in the Clerk dashboard
2. Choose the subscription item you want to update
3. Click the three dots menu
4. Update the price or plan as needed

Create custom prices

If you can't find a price that satisfies your needs from the existing options, you can create a new price by clicking "Create new price" and use it right away for your subscription transitions.

Paid plans without charging

We're currently working on a feature that will allow you to assign paid plans to customers without billing them. This capability will be valuable for several scenarios:

• Gifting subscriptions - Give users complimentary access to premium features
• Internal team access - Let your team use paid features in production without extra billing
• Migration help - Support customers who've already paid on other platforms

You can now automatically create a user's first organization with intelligent name suggestions. Clerk will detect the organization name from the user's email domain (e.g., alex@clerk.com → "Clerk") or personalize it based on member details, eliminating the manual setup step for first-time users.

This feature works best for applications with required organization membership where the creation step adds unnecessary friction.

What's new

Create first organization automatically removes friction during onboarding by automatically creating a user's first organization. When enabled, users are added to their first organization without seeing the creation flow.

Default naming rules intelligently suggest the first organization's name using:

• Email domain detection - Automatically populates the organization name, slug, and logo from the user's email domain (e.g., alex@stripe.com → "Stripe" with logo)
• Member personalization - Creates personalized names using variables like user.first_name, user.last_name, user.full_name, or user.username (e.g., {{user.first_name}}'s organization → "Alex's organization")
• Fallback name - Provides a default when other rules don't apply

Default naming rules are required to enable automatic organization creation. You can disable individual rules to skip them in the detection order.

Getting started

Visit the Organizations configuration documentation⁠ to learn how to enable automatic organization creation and configure default naming rules.

Configure these settings in the Clerk Dashboard under Organizations Settings⁠.

Understand how sticky your product is with the new user retention report. Clerk automatically tracks how often users are coming back to your application after sign up, enabling you to visualize how your retention is trending versus industry benchmarks.

Features

• Change the interval to see how your user cohorts retain over the first 30 days, 8 weeks, and 3 months.
• Visualize how your retention is changing over time by comparing the last three or six cohorts.
• Set a goal shape to measure how your retention is improving towards industry benchmarks.
• View recent cohorts in progress, or toggle off 'show incomplete period' to see only cohorts with complete data.

We're launching the Clerk MCP server in public beta — a Model Context Protocol⁠ server that helps AI coding assistants like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot provide accurate SDK snippets and implementation patterns when working with Clerk. Your agent can use Clerk's MCP server to pull up-to-date implementation guidance and best practices.

Once connected, you can ask your AI assistant questions like:

• "How do I implement authentication hooks in Next.js?"
• "Set up a B2B SaaS with organizations and role-based permissions"
• "Create a waitlist flow for my app"
• "Protect API routes with Clerk"

To see complete setup instructions and learn more about the Clerk MCP server, head to the documentation.

We'd love to get your feedback as you try out the Clerk MCP server. Reach out through our feedback portal⁠ or join the discussion in our Discord community.

We're excited to announce the launch of our new Solana⁠ authentication strategy, which makes it easy for developers to integrate Solana wallet sign-ins into their applications.

Getting Started

• Enable Solana as a Web3 authentication strategy in the Clerk Dashboard⁠
• Use the <SignIn/> and <SignUp/> components to allow users to authenticate with their Solana wallets
• See our Solana authentication documentation for detailed setup instructions and code examples

You can now control which roles are available to each organization using Role Sets. Assign different Role Sets to different organizations based on subscription tiers, customer cohorts, or business needs — if a role isn't in an organization's Role Set, members can't be assigned that role.

What's new

Role Sets allow you to define separate collections of roles and permissions across organizations. This enables advanced use cases like:

• Creating different role hierarchies for different teams or departments
• Isolating permissions across multiple products or services within one organization
• Building flexible multi-tenant architectures with customizable access patterns
• Supporting complex organizational structures with varying authorization needs

Use Role Sets when different Organizations need different available Roles. This works well for:

• Different pricing tiers - Your Free plan offers only admin and member, Pro adds moderator and analyst, and Enterprise adds security_admin and compliance_officer.
• Different customer cohorts - Small practices get physician and nurse, while large hospitals also get department_head and specialist. All cohorts share admin and member, but get additional Roles specific to their size.

When you modify a Role Set, the changes are automatically applied to all Organizations using it. This makes it easy to roll out new Roles across multiple Organizations at once.

Each instance gets one role set by default at no additional cost. Additional role sets require the Enhanced Organizations add-on.

Getting started

Visit the Role Sets documentation⁠ to learn how to create and manage Role Sets for your organizations.

You can also manage Role Sets through the Clerk Dashboard or programmatically via the Backend API. Visit the Role Sets documentation⁠ for detailed guides, or see the Backend API reference⁠ for API details.