The slack model of only paying for active users is so much better than paying for users that may not actually be using the product:

How users are counted towards billing?

"Once users are created they are automatically counted towards billing even if they don't accept the invite or ever login. A user must be explicitly deactivated, deleted, or removed from a synced user directory (if you have Google sync) to not count towards billing. Learn how to add or remove users."

With slack, they are strongly incentivized to keep the product engaging enough to hold onto users.

That's how you know if a product is for enterprise or not.

If the license model decouples actual use / utility from revenue, then it has probably been designed that way and is targeted at enterprise.

The Slack model works for applications that are constantly being used and is the center of a persons job. Like chat apps, code editors, creative tools aka Creative Cloud, Audio Tools, etc. It doesn't work for tools you only use sparingly. Like backup/recovery tools, database tools, profiling tools, etc. If you applied the Slack model to the previous set, it would not be sustainable. Your paying for value not use.

If I'm not using JIRA over the course of a given month, I don't really see why it makes sense to charge for my seat.

> "Monthly pricing is progressive

Our monthly pricing is progressive, meaning that we offer volume discounts as you add more users"

Just to nitpick: It's actually regressive pricing. The larger your corporation, the less you'll pay per user.

It's a progressive discount.

The term "regressive" attaches negative emotional connotations. Marketing would never sign off on such language.

It's just a matter of PoV, isn't it?

Maybe the per-user cost of 5,000-user contract is lower than a 25-user contract.

No. Regressive means it reduces as the quantity increases. Regressive pricing is a good thing for products. Progressive pricing like progressive taxation would suck!

I see your point. Thanks for the clarification.

Progressive is something like income tax. If you earn more than $X, you will pay more than base rate on what's more than $X. Like US tax brackets - 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, and 39.6%.

Atlassian pricing is the inverse of that, if the US does that, it will be like 39.6% for income up to $9000, then 35% up to $37000 etc.

Its not huge price jump for everyone. Its just different pricing model. Companies pay per user instead of ranges like; 1-100 user, 100-500 user, 500-1000 user.

So with the old model if you had 101 user, you would pay the same price as someone with 499 users. Thats unfair.

Massive problem in Fortune 500s. If they have to Atlassian, Git, and Microsoft ecosystems then bean counters cut off access to large sections of the company. Programmers are then siloed away from the rest of the organization.

There needs to be a casual read access tier.

Oh yes, per-seat licensing can be a huge problem.

I experienced a case in which a customer, for which most of the projects of our company were done, was requiring us to use a particular tool with paid licenses. They provided 2 or 3 floating licenses for the entire team of 30+ people, making that tool a huge bottleneck for us. They kept arguing that licenses are like 1k EUR each, but I don't think they ever realized they were wasting more money each month by slowing our work down.

It's $1 a month per user after 250 users. If that's not "casual read access tier" pricing, I'm not sure what is.

If you've got 250 users, you've probably got someone to manage these costs too. If you've got 12-40 users and much tighter operating budgets, read-only users get kind of costly.

A $1/month service is not a "massive" problem for anyone.

Wow, the marginal cost of that 11th user is ridiculous ($67/mo).

I really wish they would extend per user licensing to their on premise version as well.

It's completely stupid that if you are one user over the limit, you have to pay for the next block of licenses. It's a huge cost increase for one more user.

The attitude is pretty simple: if the company is stupid enough to insist on self-hosting, they can afford stupid prices. Support on-premise is expensive.

Atlassian doesn't sell Cloud licenses for instances beyond 2,000 users. At that point, you need to dial up your own "on-premise" Data Center version yourself on AWS in order to scale further - not to mention federated use cases, which Atlassian themselves employ, e.g. a public-facing instance for tracking suggestions and public bug reports, and an internal instance for development itself.

Atlassian Cloud hosting is for small players.

Some industries (financial for example) have to meet regulatory/audit requirements that don't allow for cloud hosting.

Aerospace and defence too.

Sure all those smart people who were hosed when AWS East was having issues and their whole development and deployment pipelines got hosed because of all the SaaS services that went down.

Headline edited to "huge price jump" which seems inaccurate.

Going from $10/mo to $77/mo for going from 10 to 11 users might be a big deal for a small company.

I think it's quite a nice introductory deal to get JIRA and Confluence for $10/month total for 10 users, since they let you keep that price regardless the time you've been using it.

I don't think making a comparison to the price for 11 users at $7/user is really fair.

so you have 10 devs comp + benefits in 150-160K range(conservative estimate) and 670 a year will make much diff?

It also looks weird when I see that the article lives on the vendor's own web site. There's no way Atlassian would title it like that.

It actually looks like the way that they should have done the pricing originally. Not that i'm a fan of Atlassian as i'd rather use open-source alternatives, but this seems fairer.

Am I wrong?

The new pricing model does not actually seem like a "huge pricing jump", but this makes me think for how long Trello will remain free...

Trello said they're staying free forever.

Perhaps Wekan fits your needs. You can host it yourself.

https://wekan.github.io/

Not for small teams:

> However, if you have 10 users or fewer, pricing will continue to be $10 for up to 10 users.

Comparing, Microsoft Team Services pricing is based on team size, but the brackets are more granular. https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/

too expensive at any price.

I