Free Plan Email, Turnstile Signup and Less Tracking: horizOn This Week

Most games send their first email long before launch. The verification mail after signup, the password reset, the "your reward is waiting" note for a closed beta. Until now, horizOn's transactional email started with a paid plan, which meant many developers on the Free plan either skipped those flows during development or wired up a separate mail provider just for testing. This week that changes.

This week's update is a smaller one. No SDK updates this time, so there is nothing to reinstall in Unity, Godot or Unreal. Instead we worked on the platform around your game: email for the Free plan, a calmer signup, less tracking and a website that holds up under load. Here is what shipped between October 13 and October 22.

Email Sending Is Now Available on the Free Plan

Server 1.71 opens transactional email for Free accounts, with tight limits. Paid plans keep their higher limits, but the feature itself is no longer locked behind an upgrade.

Why this matters during development

Email flows are among the parts of a game backend that break quietly. A template variable that is never filled, a reset link that points to the wrong environment, a language that falls back to English without anyone noticing. These are bugs you want to find while you still have time, not on launch day when the first thousand players sign up.

If you build this yourself, you need a mail provider account, sender domain setup, a template system with variables, a queue so a slow provider does not block your game requests, and some way to see whether a mail actually went out. That is a lot of plumbing for a feature you only want to test.

With email on the Free plan you can now:

• Build the full flow early. Verification, password reset or a reward notice can be wired up and tested end to end while the game is still in development.
• Use multilingual templates. Email templates support several languages, so the mail a player receives can match the language of your game.
• Call it from your engine. The Unity, Godot and Unreal SDKs already include an email manager, so sending a template is a call from your game code or a Blueprint async action, not a separate integration.
• Upgrade when volume demands it. The limits on Free are deliberately tight. Once your game needs to send more, a paid plan gives you more room. Until then, you pay nothing.

Best practices for your first email flow

1. Start with one template. Pick the flow players hit first, usually verification, and get it right before adding more.
2. Test every language you ship. Send each translated template to yourself once. Missing variables show up immediately.
3. Keep the limits in mind while testing. On the Free plan, avoid loops that send a mail on every test run. Trigger mails deliberately.
4. Never put secrets in a mail. Links should carry short-lived tokens, never passwords or API keys.

If you also use our MCP Server with an AI coding assistant, its feature prompts already offer email sending as an option, so the assistant can suggest where a mail makes sense in your game.

A Calmer Signup With Cloudflare Turnstile

The registration page used to ask new accounts to solve a sequence captcha. It kept bots out, but it also slowed down every real developer who just wanted to try horizOn.

Dashboard 1.110 replaces it with Cloudflare Turnstile, and Server 1.72 verifies the Turnstile token on signup. The check now happens on the server, so a bot cannot skip it by talking to the API directly. For most people the challenge runs in the background and there is nothing to click or solve.

This is a small change with a real effect. The first five minutes with a new tool decide whether someone stays. A signup that does not feel like a test makes that first impression better.

Less Tracking, Clearer Legal Texts

Server 1.71 removes the Meta Conversions API and the Meta pixel IDs. horizOn no longer sends conversion data to Meta. For a product that asks you to trust it with your players' data, we think that is the right default.

Alongside this, the legal pages got a round of corrections:

• The Terms and the privacy policy now name PayPal and Klarna as payment methods, processed via Stripe.
• The website shows more honest trust data and describes our support levels more clearly.
• German texts now consistently address you as "ihr" instead of switching between "du" and "Sie".

A Website That Holds Up Under Load

Two Dashboard releases this week were about stability. Version 1.110.2 keeps the website up when many crawlers hit it in parallel, and 1.110.3 refreshes cache entries before they expire and caches the backend address. The goal is simple: the site stays fast and reachable, even while search engines are indexing it.

On the server side, the public blog list now sends only a short text preview instead of the full article (Server 1.72.1). The list you are reading this from loads faster as a result.

What Did Not Change

To be clear about the scope: there are no new SDK versions this week. The current releases are Unity SDK 1.11, Godot SDK 1.10, Unreal SDK 1.9, Simple Server 1.4 and MCP Server 1.8. If you missed the bigger feature release, our article on fair leaderboards with Validated Actions and player profiles covers it in depth.

Get Updates Faster on Discord

This blog post sums up the week. If you want to hear about releases the moment they ship, join the horizOn Discord server. New versions are announced there live, often days before they appear in this weekly roundup, and it is the quickest way to ask us questions or tell us what you need next.

If you are on the Free plan, try email sending this week and tell us how far the limits take you. You can reply on Discord or open an issue on GitHub. The full list of changes is on the horizOn changelog.