How does Atlassian justify the price increases?

Atlassian invests increasingly and extensively into the development of its products and with this, justifies the price increase. Products such as Confluence, JIRA Software or Bitbucket Server are much more powerful than just a few years ago, and almost every release comes with new features for additional applications. Comparing this to similar software, Atlassian products remain in a moderate price segment.

What options do I have?

If you already have Atlassian tools, or plan to purchase new licenses, you have the following options:

  1. When you have existing licenses:
    1. You don't react, and your next support renewal will be billed at the higher price.
    2. You can extend your Atlassian support for up to 36 Monate right now, for the old price (with extensions currently available for 12, 24 and 36 months). You will pay up front for the following years, but you can take advantage of the offer now and save on the additional costs that come with the price increase for the period you renewed.
  2. When you want to purchase new licenses:
    1. Contact us before you calculate with the new pricing model - we'll give you an offer at the 'old' prices. You should also consider taking advantage of the 1 to 3-year support renewal option for the 'old' prices.

Does Atlassian regularly make price adjustments or is this an exceptional case?

Historically, Atlassian has adjusted its license prices every few years (often two to four years). You can assume that this will happen regularly in the future. Below you will find an overview of the price increases over the last three years:

  • March 2014 > 25% price increase on average for FishEye and Crucible
  • October 2014 > 27% price increase on average for JIRA Core
  • November 2014 > 16% price increase on average for Confluence Questions and Team Calendars
  • August 2016 > 15% price increase on average for Confluence
  • October 2017 > 12% price increase on average for all Atlassian licenses

Note: to be able to be clear, we can only consider changes that allow a direct comparison. The changes involved with JIRA and JIRA Agile to JIRA Software are therefore not included, since this was also a structural change.

Is there any automatic price protection for customers (grandfathering)?

No, Atlassian no longer supports grandfathering programs. Instead, Atlassian actively informs customers in the lead-up to any planned price adjustments and provides them with the opportunity to react and take advantage of prices before their planned increases.

Are third-party add-on prices also automatically increasing?

Add-on developers have the option to bind their product's price to the parent software's license (for example, JIRA or Confluence). An increase would therefore make those respective add-ons more expensive. From experience, we can say that in the past, only a few developers have used this linked pricing model. However, add-on developers can manually revise prices at any time and many developers have done so in situations like this in the past.

What happens if I have purchased the maximum support extension and then need to upgrade?

If you need to upgrade, your existing support for the current year expires. However, unused full support years will be added to your upgraded software. So this is not a disadvantage, compared to upgrading from an existing one year support (the support during the remaining months of this year would also be lost). For example: if you currently have a 36-month support period, but find you need a higher user tier at the 10 month mark, the additional cost of 24 months of support at your new tier will be automatically applied to your upgrade.


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This content was last updated on 09/12/2018.

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