# Clerk Changelog — Page 39

# Changelog July 22, 2022
URL: https://clerk.com/changelog/2022-07-22.md
Date: 2022-07-22
Category: Company
Description: Customizable Session tokens, Clerk playground, and an updated Data Processing Agreement.

## Customizable Session tokens

You could always generate custom JWTs with Clerk, but now you can add new claims directly to the Session token encoded in the HTTPOnly cookie.

This token is guaranteed to be up-to-date, and will impose no latency on any requests you make.

You can find this new option in your Dashboard. Navigate to:

**Settings > Sessions > Customize Session Token**

![JWT token implementation guide](./59d4a3d7be430dbee061130b62db99577fd538ba-3248x2112.png)

Thanks to the contributors: Haris Chaniotakis

## Clerk Playground

We've created a new "Playground" that lets you easily explore Clerk's React SDK and our APIs. We've tried to keep the examples pared down and simple, so that you can use them as a reference when building your own custom flows. Our plan is to continually add to this repository of examples as a resource to help developers get going quickly with Clerk.

See the [live example](https://playground.clerk.app), or go [straight to the repo](https://github.com/clerkinc/clerk-playground)

If there's a custom flow you want to see built, [let us know in our discord](https://clerk.com/contact/support)

Thanks to the contributors: Ian McPhail, Charles Wefso

## Data Processing Agreement

To be in compliance with GDPR, we've updated our data processing agreement and established a formal local presence in the EU.

Read the full agreement [here](/data-processing-agreement).

Thanks to the contributors: Braden Sidoti

---

# Changelog July 15, 2022
URL: https://clerk.com/changelog/2022-07-15.md
Date: 2022-07-15
Category: Company
Description: Redesigned components enter beta with improved default styles and vastly more customizability! Plus, we're migrating free plans and we upgraded our WAF.

## Redesigned components enter beta

Our redesigned components have entered private beta! This upgrade includes:

1. **Improved default styles** - Everything feels a bit more balanced and modern and by default.
2. **Vastly more customizability** - We're introducing an "appearance" prop that enables components to be customized with Tailwind, CSS Modules, or any styling solution that uses classnames.

![Redesigned components enter beta screenshot](./01a9e053edac8af156d548a7c36aada28af7f6f5-1920x764.png)

To join the beta, please join [our Discord](https://clerk.com/discord) and reach out in the #components-beta channel.

Thanks to the contributors: Nikos Douvlis

## Free plan migration

Next week, we will be migrating customers from our old free plan to [our new free plan](/pricing) that launched three weeks ago. This plan has a different set of features – more in some places, less in others – so we encourage everyone to verify the new plan still works for their business.

Impacted customers will also be notified by email.

## WAF infrastructure upgrade

Behind the scenes this week, we migrated to a new "Web Application Firewall."

As Clerk has grown, attacks on our service have (unfortunately) also grown more frequent. We use a Web Application Firewall to help prevent against account takeovers by [brute force attack](https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Brute_force_attack).

All customers received this update for free and we did not detect any impact to latency, or to non-automated traffic.

---

# Changelog July 8, 2022
URL: https://clerk.com/changelog/2022-07-08.md
Date: 2022-07-11
Category: Company
Description: Next.js 12.2, Emails with high deliverability, Sign in with Line, Odds and ends.

## Next.js 12.2

We've upgraded our `@clerk/nextjs` package to support Next.js 12.2, Make sure you're on version 3.7.1 or greater.

Thanks to the contributors: Peter Perlepes

## Emails w/ High Deliverability

We're testing out a new email flow. Our core verification emails are sent through Sendgrid, from *your domain*. Even though we follow all of the best practices, there are a few things we can't account for that still causes some verification/sign-in emails to go to spam.

For people having trouble, this new email flow should solve your problems:

- Emails are sent from Postmark.
- Emails are sent from `verifications@clerk.dev`
- Will only send OTP verifications, since these have historically had less deliverability issues.

If you're having issues, send us an email at `support@clerk.com` to enable.

Thanks to the contributors: Agis Anastasopoulos

## Sign in with Line

Allow your users to sign in via Line [https://line.me/en/](https://line.me/en)

Thanks to the contributors: Haris Chaniotakis

## Backend API updates

- [Custom Session Token](/docs/reference/backend-api/tag/sessions/POST/sessions/\{session_id}/tokens/\{template_name}) - Clerk automatically keeps session tokens alive, now you can customize what data goes into these tokens. Previously, this was only possible by creating a custom JWT template, and sending it to your backend manually.
- [Filter invitations by status](/docs/reference/backend-api/tag/invitations/GET/invitations)

Thanks to the contributors: Giannis Katsanos, Agis Anastasopoulos

---

# Changelog July 1, 2022
URL: https://clerk.com/changelog/2022-07-01.md
Date: 2022-07-02
Category: Company
Description: Organizations, "verify after sign up", and big email upgrades.

## Organizations

![Webhook configuration screenshot](./3245038eed5f5e50e030ec130188a1e090788f1f-3248x2112.png)

We've officially launched V1 of our Organizations product! It's been stress tested by a bunch of design partners over the past couple weeks (thank you for your help!), and we're really excited to finally get open up this functionality publically.

Supporting "organization auth" comes with a number of challenges that exist both in the frontend and backend. Clerk makes all of this simple by giving you easy-to-use react hooks, and the perfect "Organization abstraction" I've you're building a B2B SaaS, an internal tool, or any sort of app with user-grouping, your life just got a whole lot easier. Our initial

- The Organization object
- Role Based Access Control
- Invitation flows
- SAML is coming soon!

[https://clerk.com/docs/organizations/overview](https://clerk.com/docs/organizations/overview)

(Note: Clerk's organizations functionality works great with the Open Source [use-stripe-subscription](https://github.com/clerkinc/use-stripe-subscription) package we created. It gives you the majority of the building blocks you need for a complete SaaS!)

Thanks to the contributors: Alex Ntousias, Giannis Katsanos, Peter Perlepes

## Verify after sign up

This has oddly been one of our most sought-after features, and it's finally here. In most cases, you don't need to verify your users email addresses or phone numbers right at sign up. You want to get users in your app as quickly as possible, and then asynchronously verify them.

One of the best implementations of this we've seen are the masters over at Stripe:

![Webhook configuration screenshot](./ee93457ae669e17111d12e364918fb4190b5e51c-3248x2112.png)

And now, you can easily recreate this onboarding flow simply by turning it on in the dashboard!

![Webhook configuration screenshot](./9ffe4b7e673526842d5aec58ab14d3a697b1161a-3248x2112.png)

Thanks to the contributors: Haris Chaniotakis

## Email upgrades

**1. Metadata in emails**

You can now include user and organization metadata directly in your email templates. This gives you the ability to personal verification and invitation emails to a much higher degree.

![Webhook configuration screenshot](./1dd1dd3add014825666949d8589b6ea0acf2ec12-2166x1466.png)

*Note: The following features didn't quite make the Friday deadline, but they will be out first thing Monday!*

**2. Customizable "from name"**

In order to ensure deliverability, you should be sending your emails from an email address that actually exists. Because we send emails from your domain i.e. `notifications@example.com`, you can now also change the "from name" portion, so that it maps to an acutal email account. (i.e. [support@example.com](mailto:support@example.com))

**3. BYO Email/SMS provider**

Additionally, if you don't want Clerk to deliver your emails at all, and you'd rather do it yourself -- you can turn off "Delivered by Clerk", and listen to the new "email.created" and "sms.created" webhooks. You will even receive the templated emails, so all you have to do is pass along the subject/body to your provider! You can also just use the raw-data and create your own custom email using this approach.

**4. "High Deliverability emails" (coming soon)**

It's always frustrating when an email isn't delivered properly. One part of email deliverability is "Domain reputation", and when building a new project, you usually have a new domain with *negative reputation.* It takes time to build up that reputation so GMail and MS Outlook (and others) don't send your verification and invitation emails to the dreaded "Promotions" tab, or even worse, to spam.

In order to alleviate this, we'll optionally allow verification and invitaiton emails to be sent from "@clerk.dev", which has a bullet-proof reputation because it sends a lot of verification emails, and it only sends verification emails. This will make it so your verification/invitations always land in your users inbox.

Thanks to the contributors: Mark Pitsilos

---

# Changelog June 10, 2022
URL: https://clerk.com/changelog/2022-06-10.md
Date: 2022-06-11
Category: Company
Description: Side-by-side Web2 & Web3 auth, strict sign up requirements, brand new documentation, use-stripe-subscription, inaugural weekly office hours

## Side-by-side Web2 & Web3 auth

Until this week, our support for Web3 has been all-or-nothing. You couldn't configure an application to have *both* Web3 authentication factors and Web2 authentication factors.

Now, developers can enable any combination of Web2 and Web3 they like, from the moment they create a new application:

![Side-by-side Web2 & Web3 auth screenshot](./2ba329a19864ca8b9941e7e324a7b0519ab94a31-1636x1368.png)

This has been the top requested feature for Web3 applications since we originally launched support. Now that it's complete, it clears the way for us to begin adding additional wallet support.

Thanks to the contributors: Agis Anastasopoulos, Mark Pitsilos, Haris Chaniotakis

## Strict sign-up requirements

This week we added an explicit "Required" toggle to four user management settings:

1. Email address
2. Phone number
3. Username
4. Name (First and Last)

Previously, we assumed what developers wanted as strictly required based on their other choices in the dashboard.

Critically, when users signed up with any Social Login vendor in the past, every other user attribute was considered optional. With this assumption, we found there were edge cases where this behavior wasn't necessarily desirable.

The most common edge-case comes from Social Login providers like Facebook, which do not necessarily return an email address from the oauth process. 99% of Facebook users *will* return an email address, but the other 1% will only return a phone number. For this 1% of cases, should Clerk prompt the user for an email address, or should we let them proceed without one?

With our new dashboard settings, we no longer need to guess!

![Strict sign-up requirements screenshot](./cfd0f20509f68a09c42e1d9a1af3d607446f3e45-1202x648.png)

Thanks to the contributors: Agis Anastasopoulos, Mark Pitsilos, Haris Chaniotakis

## Brand new documentation

The past several weeks we've been scouring historical support requests to learn how we can better write and organize our documentation.

We launched [brand new documentation](/docs) to better support developers. There's a new organization to make content more discoverable, and a ton of new writing to surface things that were missing.

![Brand new documentation screenshot](./94d562a0f0e10ee0f43590836b58454b815cf80a-2880x1350.png)

Thanks to the contributors: Ian McPhail, Marcel Cruz, Charles Wefso, Braden Sidoti

## use-stripe-subscription

We launched [use-stripe-subscription](https://github.com/clerkinc/use-stripe-subscription) to make it easier for React developers to implement Stripe Billing. This open source package will serve as the foundation of our eventual Stripe integration, which is slated to launch in Q3.

We also wrote a blog post about our experience refactoring [Stripe's API for frontend access](/blog/refactoring-stripes-api-for-frontend-access).

Thanks to the contributors: Colin Sidoti, Braden Sidoti

## Inaugural weekly office hours

We held our first weekly office hours this week! We had a great time on Twitch fielding questions from the audience, sharing more about roadmap, and discussing technology trends a bit more colloquially.

The exact time for office hours will likely float from week to week. The best way to learn the time is to follow [our X account](https://x.com/clerk).

Thanks to the contributors: Ian McPhail, Colin Sidoti

---

# Changelog June 17, 2022
URL: https://clerk.com/changelog/2022-06-17.md
Date: 2022-06-11
Category: Company
Description: Updated pricing, Organizations hooks, AppSync support

## Updated pricing

With the upcoming release of Organizations, we'll also be updating our pricing. If you're not using organizations, and would like to be on our legacy pricing plan, you should **upgrade by the end of next week.** Existing applications will be grandfathered into their current pricing plan.

Review our new pricing plans here:

[https://clerk.com/pricing](/pricing)

Thanks to the contributors: Braden Sidoti, Colin Sidoti

## useOrganization()

We've finalized our organizations feature set, with the addition of the easy-to-use React hooks useOrganization() & useOrganizationList(). Updated docs live!

[/docs/organizations/overview](/docs/organizations/overview)

The official release will come sometime next week.

Thanks to the contributors: Peter Perlepes

## AWS AppSync support

You can now seamlessly authorize requests on AWS AppSync using the "openid-connect-authorization flow".

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/security-authz.html#openid-connect-authorization](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/security-authz.html#openid-connect-authorization)

Thanks to the contributors: Sokratis Vidros

## Weekly office hours

This upcoming week we will be holding our second office hours. Come join us on Thursday to chat about the future of authentication!

The exact time will likely be posted soon. The best way to learn the time is to follow [our X account](https://x.com/clerk).

Thanks to the contributors: Ian McPhail, Braden Sidoti