Atlassian hikes prices for most cloudy JIRA and Confluence users

17 annual pricing tiers – that's not a typo – now on offer

Fresh from encouraging users to buy bundles of its stuff, Atlassian is changing the way it charges for cloudy versions of its software and says the result will be that “the majority of customers will receive an increase in their bill” of about US$2/month/user for JIRA and Confluence products.

Sean Regan, the company's head of product marketing for JIRA, told The Register the change is the first in six years, during which time Atlassian has added numerous features and increased its R&D spend. He denied the changes have anything to do with satisfying investors after Atlassian's 2015 IPO. Some of the changes, he said, were sparked by “thousands of JIRA tickets from customers asking for it.” Regan characterised the changes as representing a move from on-premises licensing conventions that see vendors sell bundles for up capped number of users to cloud-like per-user pricing.

If you were one of those who asked for it, here's what you're getting: for monthly users, Atlassian currently offers flat prices for organisations with more than 10 users and seven tiers. The new arrangement reduces that to four tiers, as the table below shows.

Monthly Pricing

Product	Up to 10 users (users 1-10)*	For more than 10 users (11-100 users)	For the next 150 users (101-250 users)	For each additional user (251-2,000 users)
JIRA Software	$10.00 flat	$7.00/user	$4.00/user	$1.00/user
JIRA Core	$10.00 flat	$5.00/user	$3.00/user	$1.00/user
Confluence	$10.00 flat	$5.00/user	$3.00/user	$1.00/user
Portfolio for JIRA	$10.00 flat	$3.50/user	$2.00/user	$0.50/user
Capture for JIRA	$10.00 flat	$2.30/user	$1.30/user	$0.30/user
Questions for Confluence	$10.00 flat	$2.50/user	$1.50/user	$0.50/user
Team Calendars for Confluence	$10.00 flat	$2.50/user	$1.50/user	$0.50/user

The new tiers mean that you pay the same price for users 11-100, then the same price for users 101-250 and so on up the tiers, rather than the lowest applicable rate for all users. 

Annual users now have mind-muddling 17 tiers to chose from, detailed here. Annual pricing offers a year's usage for the price of ten months, an incentive Regan again said is not related to post-IPO cashflow concerns.

There's some silver lining in this cloud, as JIRA Service Desk prices are also going down for all users and pricing for the 1-10 user tier of other products remains unchanged. As the majority of Atlassian-using organisations are in that tier, they won't see a price hike. Instead, the big end of town will wear this one. Atlassian thinks those customers won't have trouble swallowing the change: its announcement of the hike says “We fundamentally believe that even with these price changes, we're still the value leader in the market.”. ®