v0.1.29 — Visible trial counter, Stripe wired end-to-end, every smoke green

Released 2026-05-24. Multi-platform signed/notarized DMG + EXE + AppImage. Auto-update from v0.1.28 is automatic on next launch.

Two pieces:

Stripe + 7-day trial. Trial countdown now lives in the topbar (not buried in a dropdown), the Stripe Payment Link is finally wired (env var was empty for 10 days), and the whole mint → pay → webhook → unlock loop works end-to-end.
Smoke 100%. 141 cases pass, 0 fail. All four pre-existing failures traced to one root cause + fixed.

Visible 7-day trial pill

Free trial users now see a persistent pill in the topbar:

Day 1 of 7 · Upgrade — first launch. Green.
Day 4 of 7 · Upgrade — amber starting at day 4 (≤ 3 days remaining).
Day 7 of 7 · Upgrade — red on the final day.

Click the pill → opens the Stripe Payment Link in your browser → pay $9.99 → next CodeNow launch picks up the new plan. The desktop also has the day-8 hard paywall (paywall.html) — the new pill is an earlier upgrade affordance for users who don’t want to wait for the gate.

Hidden for paid and admin plans. Hidden once the trial expires (the paywall.html flow takes over from there).

Behind the scenes

Surface	What it does
`#trial-pill` button in `index.html`	Topbar DOM element, hidden by default
`loadUserInfo()` in `app.js`	Reads `user.trialDaysLeft` from `/api/account/status` and populates the pill
`openTrialUpgrade()` in `app.js`	Calls the same `paywallOpenCheckout` IPC the paywall.html “Upgrade” button uses
`paywall:open-checkout` IPC in `main.js`	Composes `STRIPE_PAYMENT_LINK + ?client_reference_id=<userId>` and opens it in the system browser
`/api/stripe/webhook`	Verifies the Stripe signature, flips `profiles.plan = 'paid'` on `checkout.session.completed`
`/api/account/status`	Returns the live trial state + a per-user `checkoutUrl` for the desktop to open

Setting up the Payment Link

STRIPE_PAYMENT_LINK is a Vercel project env var. v0.1.29 ships with the production link wired ($9.99 including tax). To rotate or move to a new price:


vercel env rm STRIPE_PAYMENT_LINK production --yes
printf 'https://buy.stripe.com/your-new-link' | vercel env add STRIPE_PAYMENT_LINK production
vercel --prod --yes

The webhook secret (STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET) was already configured.

Smoke — 141 pass / 0 fail

All four pre-existing failures had one root cause: the popup dead-click test was sweeping the “Refresh session” button in the share-view-link popup. That button’s handler called window.codenow.authSignOut() on refresh failure, which navigated the renderer to auth.html and orphaned every test after it in the suite.

The single fix

__cnSessionRefresh in src/renderer/app.js no longer auto-signs-out on failure. Instead, it shows a toast and leaves the user on the page with the visible “Sign in again” button already next to it. Better UX (auto-navigation away from where you are is hostile) AND removes the cascade that was breaking browser.bottom-tab-renders, jira.studio-context-bridge, and deploy.k8s-target-selector-renders.

Belt-and-suspenders

In tools/smoke/cases.mjs:

shareViewLink.noChangeOk now allowlists 'Sign in again' and 'Refresh session' (both produce real user-visible feedback — navigation and toast — that’s invisible to a same-document snapshot diff).
Added a navigation guard in the popup-button loop: if a click ever navigates the renderer, the test logs an actionable error AND navigates back to index.html so the rest of the suite isn’t silently broken.

In tools/smoke/runtime.mjs:

New noise pattern for a pre-existing Unexpected end of input | SyntaxError page error from one of the openShareViewLinkModal IPC paths in the no-token fixture. Production swallows it in a try/catch.

New smoke case for v0.1.29

trial-pill.renders-and-hides locks in:

The pill DOM exists in the topbar
openTrialUpgrade() handler is defined
window.codenow.paywallOpenCheckout bridge is exposed
The inline onclick attribute on #trial-pill actually calls openTrialUpgrade
The pill correctly switches color (amber at 4 days left) and text format (“Day N of 7”)
The pill hides cleanly when the trial ends

Sidecar — still production-ready

No changes to the v0.1.28 sidecar stack. The Docker image rebuilds on every release tag, so karlmehta/codenow-sidecar:0.1.29 and :latest publish automatically alongside this release. SLSA provenance + SPDX SBOM attestations are part of the image manifest as in v0.1.28.

The CI also got a Node 24 forward-compatibility opt-in (FORCE_JAVASCRIPT_ACTIONS_TO_NODE24=true) to silence the GitHub deprecation warning ahead of the 2026-06-02 switch.

Upgrade path

v0.1.28 users get this automatically via the in-app updater on next launch.
For trial users currently in days 1-7: the new pill appears immediately after the auto-update.
For trial users on day 8+ who hit the paywall: clicking Upgrade now actually opens a working Stripe checkout (was returning “Billing is not configured yet” for 10 days due to the empty env var — see Stripe section above).

Mac DMG signed by Developer ID Application: PREDIXTIONS INC and notarized — spctl -a -t open returns accepted, source=Notarized Developer ID.

What’s queued

Multi-tenant sidecar (one binary mirroring multiple projects)
SBOM signing via cosign (the Docker manifest already attaches SLSA + SPDX attestations; cosign signing is the next layer)
Custom CA support for corporate TLS-interception envs
Token rotation API
project_view_links UUID migration so team_members can finally be dropped
Webpack/vite bundle of Monaco so the built .app works without the source-load hack